Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2019

OMNIA

CONTENTS

FEATURES 12 Playing in the Pocket English’s Herman Beavers performs a balancing act of creative expression and educational innovation.

20

By Blake Cole

20 Space, Time,

and Laboratories

The long history of David Rittenhouse Lab.

By David Brainard and Susan Ahlborn

24 Recovery and Rejuvenation

Penn’s Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities builds alliances to restore knowledge.

12

24

28

34

42

46

By Jane Carroll

28 Minds in the Wild Psychology’s Elizabeth Brannon and MindCORE get research out of the lab and into the community.

By Michele W. Berger

34 Whatever You Say, Say Everything

In a wide-ranging career, Political Science’s Brendan O’Leary has aided in peace negotiations and become a leading voice in the study of power-sharing.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

42 Summer of Science As early as the summer after their first year, students in the College have the opportunity to work alongside faculty in the lab.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

46 OMNIA 101:

Listening to Music Music’s Jairo Moreno explains how listening is at once historical, social, personal, affective, and technical.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

SECTIONS 1

DEAN’S MESSAGE

48 FACULTY OPINION

2

EDITOR’S NOTE

50 STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

3

SCHOOL NEWS

54 IN THE CLASSROOM

8

FINDINGS

56 MOVERS & QUAKERS

32 THE POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES

58 PARTNERS & PROGRESS

45 ONLINE CONTENT

64 LAST LOOK

60 INSOMNIA

DEAN’S MESSAGE

FALL/WINTER 2019

EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts & Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 P: 215-746-1232 F: 215-573-2096 E: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts & Sciences 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 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 aid, educational or athletic programs, or other Universityadministered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover Illustration: Noa Denmon

AN ARTS & SCIENCES WELCOME The fall semester brings new faces to campus—faculty, grad students, visiting researchers, and, of course, undergraduate students.

As the largest undergraduate school at Penn, so many of these new faces call the College their home. For first-year students experiencing college life for the first time, fall is especially exciting. And there is a “first” that is increasingly common on campus: students who are the first members of their families to attend college.

Opening our doors to first-generation students is an integral piece of Penn’s unflagging commitment to access. And we are making good on this commitment: 14 percent of the Class of 2023 identify as first-generation. This is possible thanks to need-blind admissions and our grant-based financial aid program— the largest in the country. But our commitment doesn’t end with meeting financial need.

We know that scholarships are important, but truly supporting the success of these students involves much more.

To ensure a welcoming and supportive environment, Penn has launched Penn First Plus, a multifaceted initiative in support of first-generation students. In many ways, these initiatives are formalizing what has always been part of our institutional DNA at Penn Arts & Sciences. Our dedicated faculty have long made a priority out of connecting with their students and helping them succeed in a challenging academic environment.

It is fitting that Paul Sniegowksi, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College, has long been committed to building relationships with undergraduates and guiding University policies to ensure that their classroom and campus experiences are meaningful.

Then there’s Philip Gressman of the Department of Mathematics, who asks students in his entry-level calculus class to write reflections on their experiences for next year’s class. This experiment has confirmed that validating students’ challenges and empowering them to act as resources has a powerful effect on feelings of belonging and capability. In Biology, undergraduate chair Mecky Pohlschröder oversees initiatives to reach all students, including informal get-togethers that introduce students to faculty from

Lisa J. Godfrey

OMNIA is published by the School of Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement

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

similar backgrounds or with related interests, and mentoring activities that pair students from underrepresented groups with their peers pursuing advanced degrees.

In the pages that follow, you’ll read about Herman Beavers of English and Africana Studies, who reflects on his commitment to classroom and community, as well as the lives of the students he’s mentored (p. 12).

And Simon Richter of German was motivated to plan the fall event series, the 1.5 Minute Climate Lectures (p. 4), after listening to student concerns about our environment.

These examples illustrate the norm for our faculty, who are committed to inclusive teaching and engagement with students.

It’s no accident that the pillars of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign are our extraordinary faculty and curious, driven students. They’re at work together as members of a community committed to discovery and learning. It is a commitment that never stops, yet each fall is invigorated by new people and new ideas.

Steven J. Fluharty

OMNIA

EDITOR’S NOTE

NURTURING ACADEMIC EXPLORATION As new students arrive on campus they begin a journey that will continue to shape their work and goals long after they leave. The Penn Arts & Sciences educational tradition provides students with a diversity of learning opportunities, whether it’s collaborative work in the classroom, engaging with the community outside of the classroom, or working alongside faculty mentors in labs.

In the course August Wilson and Beyond—co-taught by poet, musician, and literary scholar Herman Beavers, the subject of our cover story (p. 12)—undergraduates work alongside William L. Sayre High School students and West Philadelphia residents to study the works of award-winning playwright August Wilson. This same spirit of community immersion is on display in “Minds in the Wild” (p. 28), which profiles a lab group as they lead two studies at the Academy of Natural Sciences to better understand how children learn, part of an effort to move mind and brain research out into the community.

Heading into the lab, “Summer of Science” (p. 42) follows undergraduates, who, as early as the summer after their first year, have the opportunity to work directly alongside faculty, allowing them to conduct critical research in a collaborative setting. And in “My VIPER Summer” (p. 54), we take a look at the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research—a small and select cohort of students committed to solving the energy problems the world faces.

2

Generations of students and faculty have learned and researched in David Rittenhouse Lab (DRL), the building that’s the focus of the retrospective “Space, Time, and Laboratories” (p. 20). Built in 1954 to house math and physics and astronomy, DRL has been the setting for myriad scientific breakthroughs that have impacted global learning. Though the Lab’s legacy is strengthened with each new crop of accomplished student researchers, the article also discusses how the departments would benefit from new facilities.

Penn Arts & Sciences is also impacting the global and cultural space. In “Whatever You Say, Say Everything” (p. 34), we examine political scientist Brendan O’Leary’s career, from aiding in peace negotiations in Northern Ireland to advising the Prime Minister of Kurdistan. And “Recovery and Rejuvenation” (p. 24) profiles Penn’s Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities initiative, which builds alliances with Native Americans to restore Indigenous knowledge systems and languages.

We are grateful for the opportunity to share the experiences and accomplishments of our students, faculty, and alums. We hope you are as inspired by their stories as we are. Thanks for reading.

Blake Cole, Editor

As you read through the features, keep an eye out for the icons below. They represent the key priorities of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign.

POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU

Advancing Faculty Distinction

Realizing Student Potential

Driving Global Change

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Harnessing the Power of the Brain

Exploring the Human Experience

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2019

WILSON RECEIVES “GENIUS GRANT” Kyle Cassidy

Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “It is a testament to her skill and craft that her translation made the Odyssey fresh and relevant for readers around the world. All of us at Penn Arts & Sciences are lucky to count her as a colleague and a teacher.”

FLUHARTY REAPPOINTED AS DEAN THROUGH 2025 Steven J. Fluharty, Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, has been reappointed as Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences. His second term as Dean will run through 2025.

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies, has been named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Wilson has received attention worldwide as the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. She is currently working on a translation of the other Homeric poem, the Iliad.

Prior to his appointment as Penn Arts & Sciences Dean, Fluharty served as Penn’s Senior Vice Provost for Research and Director of the undergraduate Biological Basis of Behavior program.

Fluharty earned his three degrees from Penn as a University Scholar: his B.A. in psychology in 1979, graduating summa

The MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” is a $625,000 award with no restrictions. It is “intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” the Foundation states.

“I’m thrilled to congratulate Emily on this well-deserved honor,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr.

DRIVEN BY DATA

Fluharty was first appointed Dean in July 2013. A member of the Penn faculty since 1986, he holds primary appointments in the Department of Psychology in Penn Arts & Sciences and in Pharmacology in the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Animal Biology. He also has secondary appointments in Neuroscience and Pharmacology in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Lisa J. Godfrey

“So far, one of my main hopes is just that the publicity surrounding the award will do something to bring more U.S. public attention to issues of translation, literary and poetic form, and cultural and historical difference and also, I hope, inspire more young people to engage creatively and critically with pre-modern cultures,” Wilson says.

Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett wrote, “We believe that Dean Fluharty is exceptionally well-positioned to lead Penn Arts & Sciences through a period characterized by great opportunity and change.

A thoughtful, principled, proven leader with an infectious enthusiasm for the liberal arts and sciences, Dean Fluharty is a model University citizen.”

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

Brooke Sietinsons

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies

cum laude; his M.A. in psychobiology in 1979; and his Ph.D. in psychobiology in 1981.

The Introduction to Python for Data Science Summer Boot Camp was a primer course for the powerful programming platform.

Big data—the analysis of extremely large data sets that reveals patterns and associations—is at the forefront of the modern research process. This past summer, Penn Arts & Sciences offered two opportunities for students—at all levels and in all disciplines—to share their current work involving big data and learn about the analytics tools available to them: The Data Science Hangout, held in the Collaborative Classroom in the Weigle Information Commons at the Van Pelt Library, and the Introduction to Python for Data Science Summer Boot Camp.

The Data Science Hangout was designed as an informal gathering for undergraduate students whose summer research involved the quantitative analysis of datasets. (cont’d on p. 4) 3

SCHOOL NEWS

OMNIA The program was led by Dillon Brout, GR’19, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who learned how to program as an undergraduate.

Boot camp mentor Cyrille Doux, a physics and astronomy postdoc who uses large catalogs of galaxies to answer questions about the universe, says, “You don’t need to go very deep into understanding how you’re manipulating numbers and the memory on the computer itself for it to be a powerful tool.”

Yiran Chen, a first-year doctoral candidate in linguistics, is using behavioral data to study subjects like tonal phenomena and music-language intersection in an interdisciplinary effort, while Jennifer Stiso, a fourth-year doctoral student in neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine, is using recordings of brain and behavioral data from subjects all over the world who participate in tasks online.

Camille Dibenedetto

“If you’re trying to figure out which customers are going to want a specific deal, or if you’re a healthcare company trying to determine who responds better to different kinds of treatments, both of those questions benefit from big data analysis,” says Stiso.

Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences (R), interacts with undergraduates.

CLIMATE LECTURE SERIES DRAWS CROWDS

Sebastian Gonzalez, C’20, who presented on neural networks, says, “The meetings gave me a chance to branch out and see what others were studying.” Other attendees included Kassidy Houston, C’21, who studies psycholinguistics and uses data sets to find patterns in speech; and Lilian Zhang, C’22, who is in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program, studies Spanish, and is applying big data to the fields of psychology and cognitive science.

“Even though a particular field of research might have nothing to do with what one of these students has been studying in school, they are still able to understand and ask excellent questions,” says guest speaker Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences.

The Introduction to Python for Data Science Summer Boot Camp for graduate students acted as a primer course for the powerful programming platform, one of the main languages used in modern machine learning and data analysis.

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Brooke Sietinsons

The program was overseen by faculty mentors Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences; David Brainard, RRL Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences; and Emily Hannum, Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences.

(L–R) Kimberlie Dupiton, C’22; Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor; and Brea Watkins, C’22

This fall, faculty from Penn Arts & Sciences, the Wharton School, and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design came together with undergraduates for the 1.5 Minute Climate Lecture series. Every Wednesday in September, crowds of more than 200 people gathered to hear brief lectures on the unprecedented actions needed to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

The event, spearheaded by Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, was created in the spirit of the School’s long-running 60-Second Lectures. The lectures were extended to a minute and a half to recognize the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning that temperature rise must be limited to 1.5°C in order to avoid the most drastic effects of global warming. We are already past 1°C.

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2019

Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, gave the first lecture in the series. Faculty and student presentations included academic and personal reflections on climate change, all urging action. Topics ranged from changing precipitation in the Mongolian steppe and an astrophysicist’s long view of the earth’s changing temperatures to gentrification, greenspace, and water bottles on campus.

“The response to the event, in person and online, has been amazing,” says Richter. “The videos have been shared and viewed tens of thousands of times.

Colleagues have told me they use the talks in their classrooms. I’ve seen indications that colleagues at other institutions in the U.S. and abroad want to put on their own 1.5 Minute Climate Lectures.”

The lectures are available at www.sas.upenn.edu/climate-1point5

WENGER NAMED ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR GRADUATE STUDIES

Prior to serving in her new role, Wenger was Chair of the Department of History and was Director of the Jewish Studies Program from 2005 to 2013.

Among her many Penn affiliations, she is a Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society and Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, and a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

SUPPORT FOR LOCAL AND GLOBAL RESEARCH AND TEACHING Students and faculty are researching in local and global communities thanks to support from the Dean’s Global Inquiries Fund and the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program. Both initiatives provide funding for projects that investigate real-world challenges using the tools of the liberal arts. The Global Inquiries Fund supports a variety of activities including research, conferences, workshops, and course development, while Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants encourage faculty to explore innovative ways of applying their expertise through a combination of coursework, research, and service. These projects typify the School’s commitment to driving global change and providing avenues for student and faculty to excel.

Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor for the Teaching of Religious Thought, has been named Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in Penn Arts & Sciences. In this role, she will oversee the School’s doctoral programs, which take place in 31 graduate groups and enroll approximately 1,350 students.

“Beth is an eminent historian and educator with a strong record as an academic leader committed to student excellence and well-being,” said Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience.

Greg Benson

The projects funded by the Dean’s Global Inquiries program are: • Collaborative Pedagogies in the Global History of Science, led by JuanSebastián Gil-Riaño, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science.

• International Organizations in Crisis, led by Julia Gray, Associate Professor of Political Science.

Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor for the Teaching of Religious Thought

• Rivers Have Memory: Community Recovery of a Watershed in Times of Conflict and Transition, led by Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. (cont’d on p. 6) 5

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

The projects funded by the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program are:

Thirty-five cows live on the farm, where there are methods to reduce methane production and space for milk processing and yogurt production, all powered by solar panels. The cows eat food waste produced by local businesses, and the dairy produced on the farm is distributed in the city, cutting down on pollution caused by transportation.

• The Alice Paul Center Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Nonconforming Oral History Archive, led by Kathleen Brown, David Boies Professor of History and Director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women.

• Cognitive Decline with Aging in Diverse Chilean Communities and in Comparison with Mexico and the U.S., led by Irma Elo, Professor of Sociology.

Penn students donated a cow to Floating Farm and were given the opportunity to name her.

“Sustainabetty” now enjoys the fresh river air alongside fellow cows Madame Curie, Hanneke, Elsje, and Fred, among other bovines.

• Memory and Identity in Afro-Brazilian Archives, led by Michael Hanchard, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies.

• Life of Water: Community Resilience through Science and Art Immersion, led by Byron Sherwood, Senior Fellow in the Department of Biology.

• Understanding the Effects of Mexico’s Prospera Program on Reducing Inequalities in Schooling and Academic Achievements in Diverse Communities, led by Petra Todd, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics.

FACULTY HONORS

• Building Community Partnerships in the Galápagos Archipelago, led

by Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy.

Recent recognitions and awards for our faculty include: David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English, received The Sir Israel Gollancz Prize from the British Academy for his lifetime contribution into the study of Chaucer and Medieval Europe.

PENN STUDENTS NAME COW

Abraham Nitzan, Donner Professor of Physical Sciences, has won the 2020 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Award in Theoretical Chemistry for his research on chemical dynamics. Daniel Mindiola, Brush Family Professsor of Chemistry, received the ACS’s F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry for his research on the synthesis of early- and mid-transition metal complexes.

Courtesy of Floating Farm

Floating Farm in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Penn students have made a mark on the world’s first floating farm, now operating in the Netherlands.

Students visited Floating Farm, located in the port of Merwehaven in Rotterdam, as part of the 2019 Penn Summer Program in Berlin and Rotterdam, led

by Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He calls the farm, dedicated to animal welfare, sustainability, education, and innovation, “agricultural history in the making.”

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Michael Hanchard, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, was awarded the 2019 Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association for his book, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy.

Liang Wu, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has received the 2019 William L. McMillan Award from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois for his outstanding contributions in condensed matter physics.

Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and Marci Hamilton, Robert A. Fox Leadership Program Professor of Practice, were recently selected as 2019 Daughters of Pennsylvania.

Distinguished Daughters honors women whose professional and philanthropic work has earned regional, statewide, or national recognition and provides value to the public.

FALL/WINTER 2019

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May We Write You a Check?

A Penn Charitable Gift Annuity is a great way to make a gift and receive guaranteed payments for life — benefiting you today and Penn Arts & Sciences in the future. A charitable gift annuity can increase income now or sometime in the future, provide tax benefits that help to reduce or defer income and estate taxes, and support the next generation of liberal arts leaders.

How it works:

1. Make a gift today of $10,000 or more.

2. Receive an attractive annuity rate and guaranteed payments for life.

3. The remainder impacts the future of Arts & Sciences.

SAMPLE RATES FOR A $10,000* CHARITABLE GIFT ANNUITY ON A SINGLE LIFE Annuitant Age

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

90

Annuity Rate

4.3%

4.7%

5.1%

5.6%

6.2%

7.3%

8.3%

9.5%

Charitable Deduction*

$2,299

$2,591

$3,070

$3,625

$4,281

$4,713

$5,422

$6,116

Annual Payment

$430

$470

$510

$560

$620

$730

$830

$950

*Deductions will vary with the IRS Discount Rate at the time of your gift. Assumed rate 2.6%. Charitable Gift Annuities are not investments and are not regulated by the insurance department of any state.

Not intended as legal or tax advice. Consult your personal tax advisor.

For a personalized illustration, contact:

ARTS & SCIENCES

Lynn Malzone Ierardi, JD Office of Gift Planning 215.898.6171 lierardi@upenn.edu www.powerofpenn.upenn.edu/gift-planning

OMNIA

FINDINGS

THE MUTUALISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANTS AND ACACIAS Scott Poethig of Biology and Aaron Leichty, GR’18, examine the factors that govern the development of the acacia’s ant-sustaining traits.

BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

Dan Janzen

To study the traits in the context of plant development, Poethig and Leichty gathered acacia seeds from online sellers in Belize and from Janzen himself. They observed what Janzen had seen in the wild a half-century before.

“Sure enough, the traits appear, but not right away,” Leichty says.

After obtaining the first genome sequence of a Vachellia species, the researchers looked specifically at certain microRNAs —short, non-coding sections of the genome—miR156 and miR157, which they had previously found to be associated with controlling the developmental timing of traits in other plant species.

A founding queen acacia-ant cuts her first entrance hole into the swollen thorn in which she will start her colony, the first thorn made by this young seedling ant-acacia in Veracruz, Mexico, 1962.

D

uring his doctoral studies in the 1960s, Dan Janzen, now Thomas G. and Louise E. DiMaura Term Chair in the Department of Biology, re-described what has become a classic example of biological mutualism: the obligate relationship between acacia-ants and their host acacia trees. The acacia trees produce specialized structures to shelter and feed the ant colony, and the ants, in turn, defend the tree against herbivores.

In a recent study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, colleagues of Janzen’s in the biology department uncover a genetic mechanism that programs the plant side of the ant-acacia relationship. Scott Poethig, the John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Biology, and Aaron Leichty, GR’18, showed that these species of acacia develop the traits necessary to feed the ant colony— hollow swollen thorns to house them, and nectaries and nutrient-rich leaflet tips 8

called Beltian bodies to feed them—as part of an age-dependent phenomenon in plant development.

“There is a cost associated with making these traits,” says Poethig, senior author on the report, “but the plant needs them, otherwise it’s a goner. So there’s a tradeoff happening. And what we found is that these traits seem to have evolved on the back of a preexisting pathway that governs a developmental transition in plants.”

Leichty, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, says, “When we dug into the literature, we found that a lot of plant defense strategies are age-dependent. It’s counterintuitive because you think the young plants would want to start making these structures right away so they wouldn’t get eaten, but our findings as well as profound logic suggest there are biological constraints on making them.”

As the swollen thorn and other antattracting traits began to appear in the acacia, levels of miR156 and miR157 declined, and the levels of different protein transcription factors repressed by these microRNAs increased.

To get a sense of how the regulation of these traits may have arisen evolutionarily, the researchers explored other acacia species that do not make Beltian bodies or swollen thorns but do make nectaries on their leaves. In these species, as in the ant-acacias, miR156’s decline coincided with the appearance of the nectaries. The similarity among the acacias in this regard suggests that the existing pathway was coopted to regulate the other traits that are required for a healthy bodyguard—swollen thorns and good food—the researchers say.

To Janzen, the finding is supportive of his field discoveries, making a case for the blending of field and lab investigations.

“I watched and asked why,” says Janzen.

Of Poethig and Leichty, he notes, “They watched and asked how.”

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2019

Image courtesy of the trustees of The British Museum

GIVE AND TAKE Shira Brisman of History of Art explores how printmakers of the Northern Renaissance promoted the open exchange of artistic ideas.

BY

JANE CARROLL

I

n the 15th through 17th centuries, artists sought inspiration not only by copying nature, but also by making careful selections from one another’s work. Assistant Professor of History of Art Shira Brisman explores how artists of the period used pictorial and textual language to represent the free exchange of creative ideas.

Trained as a print scholar, Brisman examines the interplay between German printmakers and metalworkers in a recent paper, “A Matter of Choice: Printed Design Proposals and the Nature of Selection, 1470–1610,” published in Renaissance Quarterly. It won the 2019 Schulman and Bullard Article Prize from the Association of Print Scholars, which recognizes publications featuring innovative research on prints or printmaking by early-career scholars.

“In the middle of the 16th century, artists who were trained in metalwork also began to publish designs in the form of prints,” Brisman explains. “We call them goldsmith-engravers.” These artists produced booklets that offered wildly inventive proposals for metalwork objects, with title pages plainly stating that the designs were available for use by fellow craftsmen.

“These booklets, with their explicit addresses to other artisans, seemed to me to be formalizing indications of this communication that are detectable earlier— that is to say, before they start to verbalize with written words the invitation ‘make of my ideas what you wish,’ they were finding ways to promote this message visually,” says Brisman. “And one of the ways in

Israhel van Meckenem, Two Leafs, Engraving, c. 1475–1500

which they do this is through motifs of ornamental foliage—stems, vines, and growths that pour forth from the earth.”

To Brisman, these communications represent a theoretical language about usage and ownership—what we now think of as intellectual property. “My research is motivated by questions that shape our culture today—to whom does an image belong, and how widely can it be shared?” she says.

Her research also revealed that these gestures of sharing were only part of the story.

City records from the period indicate that artists sometimes sued each other in disputes over materials, tools, and motifs.

Artists and artisans of the Renaissance had reason to be protective of their output, since they competed for commissions. And the Protestant Reformation in Germany in the 16th century meant there were few commissions coming from the church, the major source of patronage for metalsmiths.

“Martin Luther was very concerned about the corruption of people paying for their salvation through the commissioning of these valuable objects,” says Brisman.

Restrictions placed on what churches

could display led them to try to redistribute precious metal objects by melting down and repurposing the metal, or moving the vessels to the domestic realm.

“I think it’s important to see the redistribution of crafted objects and waning of commissions as a backdrop to what the artists are doing,” she says. “They’re trying to advertise their creativity as having applications beyond the church. But there is also an urgency to keep artistic creativity alive. Though the court cases show concern about who owns and has rights to tools and motifs, the rhetoric they produce encourages taking, using, and adapting pictorial ideas into new forms.”

The concept of creativity as something that springs from the mind of a solitary artist persists today, but Brisman sees the creative act differently.

“I see creativity as residing in the act of making your ideas available for other people,” she says. “That is what the idea of the generative nature of art is in this period, and that’s different from the notion that artistic genius comes from a place of isolation.”

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OMNIA

FINDINGS

PARKINSON’S PROTEINS Elizabeth Rhoades of Chemistry and Melissa Birol, a postdoctoral research associate, have found a potential therapeutic target to treat the disease.

BY

ERICA K. BROCKMEIER

P

arkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects more than 6 million people worldwide, is caused by the buildup of alpha-synuclein proteins in the brain. Because of alphasynuclein’s role in neurodegeneration, researchers are actively studying this protein to understand the mechanisms of the disease and to look for new treatment strategies.

A new study from Elizabeth Rhoades, Associate Professor of Chemistry, and Melissa Birol, a postdoctoral research associate, found that when alpha-synuclein binds to extracellular glycoproteins, proteins with added sugar molecules, it can be taken up by neurons more easily. The paper also identified a specific presynaptic protein as a key regulator in this process and a potential therapeutic target.

Their findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

In one model for the pathology of Parkinson’s disease, bundles of alpha-synuclein proteins, known as aggregates, form inside a neuron. This leads to cell death and the release of alpha-synuclein protein clusters that are taken up by other neurons.

Since neurodegenerative diseases have typical progression patterns, knowing how alpha-synuclein moves between neurons helps researchers understand disease propagation.

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Research from the lab of Elizabeth Rhoades found that glycoproteins influence how neurons uptake alpha-synuclein, proteins that are implicated in Parkinson’s disease.

Birol was able to enzymatically remove specific glycans on neurons to see how their presence or absence would change alpha-synuclein uptake. The study found that when glycans were removed, the amount of alpha-synuclein clusters taken up was greatly reduced.

By also studying giant plasma membrane vesicles, synthetic membranes derived from proteins and lipids from real cells, researchers were able to study the physical interactions between alpha-synuclein and glycans. “There’s a structural basis for the alpha-synuclein binding to the glycan, and when the glycans are removed, it changes the nature of the interaction of alpha-synuclein with the cell membrane,” explains Rhoades.

This study focused on the acetylated form of alpha-synuclein proteins, which are present in both healthy and diseased neurons. They found that the acetylated form was more effective at forming clusters of proteins inside neurons. “No one’s really stressed the importance of these acetylated versions,” Birol says. “Generally, we need to take a step back in trying to understand how this protein may be propagating between cells, and I think glycans could be an aspect.”

Rhoades and Birol say that the most unexpected finding was the discovery of neurexin 1β as a potential partner in how alpha-synuclein is taken up by neurons. They hope that future research on this presynaptic protein could provide insights into new

treatment strategies for Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Future work will focus on obtaining high-resolution structures of alpha-synuclein proteins bound to glycans.

They also hope that this study will inspire future research on alpha-synuclein acetylation and the role of glycans in the progression of the disease.

“Some cells spontaneously internalize these [alpha-synuclein] proteins and some do not. It has generally been assumed that there are alpha-synuclein-specific receptors on the cells that do internalize aggregates. That may or may not be true, but [our study] suggests that it’s not just the protein receptors but the glycans that are also important,” says Rhoades.

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2019

Courtesy of Nicholas Sambanis

UNCOVERING THE ROOTS OF DISCRIMINATION TOWARD IMMIGRANTS Nicholas Sambanis of Political Science analyzes relationships between religion, ethnicity, and social norms.

BY

GWYNETH K. SHAW

W

orldwide, immigration is a source of social and political conflict. What is at the root of conflict between immigrants and native populations?

“Opposition toward immigration can be due to economic reasons because of competition for jobs, or due to the perceived cultural threat that immigrants pose to their host country by challenging dominant norms and changing the national identity,” explains Nicholas Sambanis, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

Based on his research, Sambanis, the founder and Director of the Penn Identity and Conflict (PIC) Lab, finds arguments centered on cultural threat more convincing than economic explanations of opposition to immigration, especially in Europe. He collaborated with University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Danny Choi, a former PIC Lab postdoc, and Mathias Poertner, a PIC Lab fellow and postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, to design an experiment to test if social norm adherence—in this case, an aversion to littering—could reduce discrimination against immigrants in Germany.

Their research was recently

published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Samabnis and his collaborators staged the following scenario: A native German man would litter in a public space and either be admonished or ignored by a nearby woman. Admonishing the litterer and encouraging him to clean up is an adherence to a German social norm. Then, the same woman would drop a bag of groceries. The woman’s identity was a variable: In some versions, she was a native German, in others a Muslim immigrant wearing a hijab. Observing researchers recorded whether the bystanders who had witnessed this entire interaction helped the woman pick up her groceries.

Teams of research assistants ran this experiment more than 1,600 times in 30 cities across Germany, with more than 7,000 bystanders. Researchers measured whether good citizenship— enforcing anti-littering norms—generated more help from bystanders, eliminating any bias against immigrants.

“We found that bias toward Muslims is too pronounced and is not overcome by good citizenship; immigrant women

The experiment revealed a way to partially counteract bias against Muslims.

who wore a hijab always received less assistance relative to German women, even when they followed the rules,” Sambanis says. “But we also found that good citizenship has some benefit, as the degree of discrimination toward Muslims goes down if they signal that they care about the host society. And ethnic or racial differences alone do not cause discrimination in our setup.

Nor is religious assimilation— wearing a cross rather than a hijab—necessary to be treated with civility.”

Researchers found the rates of assistance offered to a Muslim who enforced social norms by scolding the litterer were equivalent to those for a German who did not enforce the norm.

“The reason to run such an experiment focusing on everyday interactions is that it gives you a sense of the accumulated impact of discrimination in shaping perceptions of identity and belonging,”

Sambanis says. “Getting help to pick up something you drop on the floor seems like a small thing. But these small things—and small slights—add up to form lasting impressions of how others perceive you and, in turn, can inform the immigrants’ own attitudes and behavior toward the host society.”

This collaborative effort will become a book on how conflict between immigrants and native populations can be managed and whether norms can form the basis for a reduction in discrimination.

The German experiments will be expanded next year and applied to a different social context in Greece.

“A lot of the work that I do shows that ethnic conflict is not inevitable,” says Sambanis.

“The key is to understand the conditions that make ethnic differences salient and then find ways to defuse or manage conflict.”

11

OMNIA

FALL/WINTER 2019

Herman Beavers performs a balancing act of creative expression and educational innovation.

by Blake Cole Illustrations by Noa Denmon Photography by Shira Yudkoff

13

OMNIA

life is a series of stories,” reflects Herman Beavers, who wears enough hats to fill a rack. A professor of English and Africana Studies, Beavers’ scholarly interests and courses focus on 20th-century African American literature and culture, jazz and the blues, and poetry and poetics.

A published poet, his love and study of music infuse his works. Beavers’ career is also defined by his commitment to community building, whether it be finding exciting new ways to connect students with local residents, or discussing literature with veterans. His journey from a young academic to an accomplished scholar and teacher is one of intellectual and artistic curiosity, matched only by an enduring generosity.

What happens in class has everything to do with what is happening in students’ lives. Part of your job as a teacher is to make sure your mentees are able to make their story what they imagine it to be.

Beavers’ first loves were writing and music. As an undergraduate, he chose Oberlin College because of its conservatory of music. While there, he saw jazz legends like Betty Carter, Art Blakey, and Sonny Rollins perform. After graduating from Oberlin, he took a leap of faith and bypassed his “safe” plan to attend law school. He instead chose the master’s writing program at Brown University.

“I remember asking my advisor, ‘How come we don’t read African American writers in anthologies?’” says Beavers. “He said, ‘To answer that question, you have to get a Ph.D.’ So, that’s what I did.”

While Beavers was completing work on a second master’s in Afro-American Studies and said Ph.D. in American Studies, both from Yale, he began his 14

teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, which employs an unconventional grading system that requires all students to complete independent study programs. “I had a faculty mentor who said I should only devote 10 or 15 minutes to each student,” says Beavers. “But for me, those biweekly meetings turned into hour-long conversations and I came to understand that what happens in class has everything to do with what is happening in students’ lives. Part of your job as a teacher is to make sure your mentees are able to make their story what they imagine it to be.” This mantra would come to encapsulate Beavers’ career as a teacher and mentor.

Beavers came to Penn in 1989. He still remembers the impact of driving down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and seeing the Philadelphia Museum of Art. What struck him about the city was its accessibility. “It’s a city of neighborhoods. That’s what was so important to me. Ultimately, that’s why I chose Penn over other institutions,” says Beavers.

When he first arrived on campus, he was taken by the generosity of his fellow professors, some of whom would invite him to their houses to discuss their own experiences at Penn and offer wisdom.

But there was one person in particular who wasn’t afraid to be blunt with him, and it would have a lasting impact.

“There was a gentleman named Harold Haskins who worked in the Vice Provost office,” says Beavers. “He put the question to me: ‘Are you going to be one of these guys that gets tenure and then we never see you again?’ It really brought me up short because I think when I engaged that question it really changed the course of my entire career at Penn. My plan was to come here, keep my head down, do my work, teach my classes, and hopefully get tenure.”

Haskins’ challenge lit a familiar fire. Beavers started doing what he had always most enjoyed: engaging with students on a deeply personal level and learning their stories.

FALL/WINTER 2019

“In my old office in Fisher-Bennett Hall, my students used to tease me because I had this couch that was the first piece of furniture I ever owned, and when I got married my wife didn’t want it in the house, so I put it in my office,” says Beavers. “A student emailed me some years after she graduated and she said to me, ‘Life was so simple when I could come to your office and sit on your couch and talk to you.’ So, the couch was a symbol of students being able to open up to me about anything.”

The stories Beavers has helped shape are as diverse as the students themselves: a business student who found her way into acting, a National Book Award finalist, a congressman—the list goes on.

One of the mentoring roles closest to Beavers’ heart was his work with a Black male student support group. For his first seven years at Penn, Beavers met with the group once a week. “I saw one of the guys that used to be in the support group,

and our running joke is that I used to give him clothes out of my closet,” says Beavers. “He was always like, ‘Dr. B, do you have any clothes you want to part with?’

I realized those meetings were as important to me as they were to them. They gave me support in ways I don’t think they even recognized.”

When Beavers did eventually get tenure, it was a milestone for his family, he says.

“Considering that my dad was an auto mechanic who worked in the Ford plant and had an eighth-grade-education, it was tremendously validating for my family.”

Beavers’ mother, who always wanted to be a teacher, put in his head at a young age the possibility of being a professor, though he didn’t consider it again until much later. “I was a senior at Oberlin and because they didn’t have graduate students, we’d lead the sections of the entry-level creative writing course ourselves, so that was my introduction to teaching,” says Beavers, who grew up

in the Cleveland area and as an adolescent was impacted by the Civil Rights Movement, war protests, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and the Kennedys. “When I was up in front of class it made me feel like I had found my place. There was this swirling feeling all around me, and it’s my mom that made that possible.”

In order to connect students to course material on a personal level, Beavers employs unique introductory exercises.

“I try to enforce the idea that literature belongs to everyone,” says Beavers, who in 2017 received the Dean’s Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research.

“When I teach my course on Toni Morrison, I give students a timeline of Morrison’s life, then have them do a personal timeline. I then ask, ‘How does this fit with yours?’ The point being that she doesn’t speak to any one audience.

She can tell you things about what it is to be you that nobody else can tell you.”

Courtesy of Herman Beavers

Toni Morrison, who passed away in August 2019, has been a constant, driving force in Beavers’ academic career, from the time he was a young scholar. His book, Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, came about after he revisited her novel, Song of Solomon, which he calls life-changing.

“I had never read a book that so captured Black life from the inside without feeling the need to explain that for white audiences,” says Beavers. “It just felt like she was talking directly to me.”

For many years, Beavers served as a member of the advisory board of the Toni Morrison Society. “We weren’t intimate friends, but I spent a lot of time in her midst,” says Beavers. “Without her, I don’t know if I would’ve thought about becoming a writer. There’s just so much going on in her works that even when I pick up books that I’ve read dozens of times, I always see something different.

And in that respect, for me, she’s an infinite source of ideas.”

Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies, lectures in an African American autobiography course during the The Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen in 1992.

OMNIA Beavers also authored Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, in which he offers a study of Gaines, McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who found ways to portray the cultural vitality surrounding the lives of the downtrodden.

In addition, Beavers is an editor at African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Black Scholar.

Beavers’ own journey as a poet began in his formative years.

His first poem was published when he was 17, part of a contest in which the winning selection was to be placed in a time capsule and buried. “Looking back now at that poem, if aliens came down to an empty Earth, they’d say, ’No wonder they’re not here anymore. Look at this crap,’” he laughs.

Obsidian Blues # 36 on the slaveship used to be, a polemic blast of wind, the mere hint of an ache & somewhere sits a child sadder than me, long gone brother suffering through yet another mention of this light

Beavers performs poetry readings at a variety of venues, and his material can be found online at PennSound, a vast archive of audio recordings of poets performing their own works. “I started off as somebody that really didn’t like to be in front of people, and so poetry was sort of my way to overcome that,” says Beavers. “I was so nervous during my senior creative writing major reading at Oberlin—my hands were shaking.”

around me, a bright tumbling; character, the falsest of alarms— electricity shirring, doubt scoffing this pyrophoric embrace

in Kansas City

Since then, Beavers has had the opportunity to perform his poems the world over. In summer 2019 he was invited to the Yellow Crane Tower in China, a historical structure famous for featuring visiting poets of note on one of its top floors.

He was also invited to compose and read a poem at the inauguration of the new president of Morehouse College.

a man puts a saxophone to his lips, remembers a darkness worth the effort; the flash & murmur of a sad rallentando floods his head like a brackish, swollen river impersonating a heaven he could never afford - from Obsidian Blues 16

Beavers’ poems have appeared in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine, and The American Arts Quarterly, and have been anthologized in the 2014 Anthology of Featured Poets, Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-First Century and, most recently, an anthology titled, Who Speaks For America. He has released three chapbooks, and has a full-length collection on the way.

They include: A Neighborhood of Feeling in 1986, Obsidian Blues in 2017, The Vernell Poems in 2019, and the upcoming Even in Such Light.

Beavers’ poetry has not only taken him far and wide, but has also given him the opportunity to rub shoulders with musicians, visual artists, and myriad other creative types.

“As scholars, we’re trying to sustain a line of inquiry. A creative artist isn’t concerned with arguing—they are seeking to establish a dialogue, which means that sometimes we place ourselves on the wrong side of an argument.”

The genres of jazz and the blues have come to inform nearly every aspect of Beavers’ creative process. His 2017 chapbook, Obsidian Blues, is a literary personification of music.

FALL/WINTER 2019

“I wanted to figure out a way to think about the instrumental blues and to ask, ‘What would happen if I tried to imagine the sentiment that’s being expressed by Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or a Lester Young, Charlie Parker, or Sonny Rollins?’”

Beavers, a novice piano player himself, jokes, “I have these big stubby fingers, so sometimes it’s a challenge for me.

But it’s been great for me as a poet to learn how to play, because sometimes you have to voice a chord with the exact right fingering, which is like trying to produce an appropriate syntax in writing.”

Insights gleaned from both playing and listening to music have heavily influenced Beavers’ poetry. In Obsidian Blues, Beavers began making writing adjustments based on his enjoyment of musical phrasing in the blues, such as eliminating “to be” verbs. In the process, he became less wedded to the sentence and more driven by the phrase. “I started using semicolons and commas and dashes and things like that to really break up the sentence,” he says. “Musicians like Ornette Coleman and Keith Gerit have a little burst of really beautiful melody that then shifts into something else, so I said, ‘What would happen if I tried to do that in a poem?’”

as a sort of bungee cord where you go out as far as you can, but you also find your way back to the stuff that you know.”

Beavers’ love of jazz also informs his curriculum. His course, Trading Fours: The Literatures of Jazz (trading fours is a jazz term that refers to when band members exchange solos, each lasting four bars), examines the ways in which poetry, drama, and other forms of literature engage with the genre. The class has also featured various guest lecturers over the years, including one of Beavers’ heroes, the late Harrison Ridley, a local radio legend.

“Harrison Ridley on the Temple University radio station was one of the most amazing human beings I have ever met,” says Beavers. “He was a janitor in the Philadelphia School District but had this show called The Historical Approach to the Positive Music, and he would take you through a journey of all this music, focusing on one musician every week.

I invited him to come to my class, and he said, ‘Well look, I’ll come to the class,

but you have to have a turntable.’ So, I had to scrounge up a turntable. He comes to my class literally carrying canvas shopping bags filled with vinyl. He puts them on. He starts playing them.”

Just as Beavers works to bring members of the community into the classroom, he is also committed to finding innovative ways for students to engage with local residents.

Beavers’ commitment to community building is at the core of his educational philosophy. When he first moved to the area to start at Penn, he led a series of book discussions in the Camden County Library System. From there, Beavers worked a three-year stint with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, which saw him traveling all over the state to discuss the African American short story.

Thematically, Beavers also wanted to address the notion that the blues are inherently tied to sadness. “The blues are actually a lot more about the ways we can be joyous and trepidatious all at once, about saying, ‘If I can metaphorize my trouble, I can make it to the next day.’

So, I thought a lot about the internal life that these people I was inventing in my head were experiencing.”

Listening to Beavers talk about jazz reveals a love that runs deep. He likens the genre to a democratic conversation.

“Jazz is this really elaborate house an ensemble builds together. It doesn’t matter where you come from, because if you understand that language, you can be up on that bandstand playing ,” says Beavers. “The setlist can be the same, but every night it’s going to sound different.

That’s what is both thrilling and terrifying about jazz. Like poetry, it is the practice of freedom. The challenge is to think of it

American playwright August Wilson, depicted here, is a longtime inspiration for Professor of English and Africana Studies Herman Beavers, and the focal point of the community engagement class Beavers co-teaches.

OMNIA Jared Valdez / Pennsylvania Humanities Council

Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies, with members from Veterans Upward Bound, a program designed for veterans seeking to regain learning skills and prepare for college-level studies.

“I just really like talking to community members about things that some people might say are over the heads of those that live in certain kinds of communities, and I just have not found that to be the case,” says Beavers. “While some of the people are not necessarily college educated, they love books and they’re hungry to talk to somebody about them.”

Beavers’ August Wilson and Beyond course is a concerted effort to engage his students with the community of West Philadelphia. “Yes, West Philadelphia has problems like any community does, but we cannot operate from the standpoint that it’s broken,” says Beavers.

“It has tremendous beauty, strength, and legacies, and it’s really been a joy to come in contact with that.”

Beavers’ muse for the course is longtime inspiration August Wilson, the creator of a seminal 10-play cycle on 20th-century Pittsburgh that forms an iconic picture of African American traumas, triumphs, and traditions throughout the decades.

Undergraduates work alongside William L. Sayre High School students and West Philadelphia residents to study the works of the award-winning playwright.

“One of the things that I want to pass on to this next generation is, ‘How do you engage with a community. How do you build a conversation? How do you build trust?’” says Beavers.

One of the things that I want to pass on to this next generation is, “How do you engage with a community. How do you build a conversation? How do you build trust?”

Suzana Berger, C’02, who teaches the class alongside Beavers, was a student of his in the late ’90s, and collaborated with him to develop the course upon returning to live in the city. She introduced him to the late Fran Aulston, the then-Executive Director of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. Bernadette Tanksley and Vernoca Michael, also instrumental in the formation of the course, are personal friends of Beavers, and continual collaborators.

Beavers and Berger decided early on that rather than writing a theatrical piece, they’d have the students do interviews in the community and then write monologues performed by professional and amateur actors. “Nobody at Penn had ever structured a class this way before, so we were making history in a way,” says Beavers.

Beavers and Berger opened the course to West Philly residents and local high schoolers, an aspect vital to the learning experience, he says. “Having a 68-yearold retired social worker talking about how gentrification impacts communities

like what August Wilson is talking about in Two Trains Running—to have that is really important. In that respect, it’s kind of like jazz. Every year the class is different because we can’t rest on our laurels.”

The course, which was awarded the first Netter Center Community Engagement Prize, does not require residents to pay an auditor’s fee to attend, thanks to efforts by Berger. “Penn could make a lot of money if people wanted to take the class, and we just don’t do that, because this is an opportunity for them to have something with us that we make together, and they should not have to pay money for that,” says Beavers. “So, when we do our community event, we buy the books and we distribute them to the audience.

Collaboration is about give and take.”

Beavers has also collaborated with the TRIO Veterans Upward Bound Program at Penn, a free, non-credited, non-profit, pre-college program that is federally funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

FALL/WINTER 2019

The program’s director reached out to him because the group was also using August Wilson to generate discussion.

new audiences. He plans to collaborate with the African American Museum in Philadelphia for an upcoming graduate seminar.

The core of the class will be an introduction to jazz studies. Beavers also hopes to interface with the Philly Jazz Archives. “We’re going to use some of the materials from the museum, and we’re going to talk about jazz and memory and history,” he says. “I want the class to culminate in a free concert at the museum.”

“These are vets telling stories about being drug addicts and alcoholics and losing their families, and, all of a sudden, again, it’s about the stories that people are telling,” says Beavers, who first spoke with the group in 2017.

“We’re talking about the plays, we’re talking about the characters, and I realize that this is the kind of teaching that I love doing.

It could have been one of those things where the organizer said, ‘Dr. Herman Beavers is going to come and talk to us,’ and I could have used that as an opportunity to lecture for 50 minutes and be on my way. Instead, it worked out to be a two-and-a-half-hour conversation that I really didn’t want to end.”

Beavers is also in conversation with Farah Hussain of the Perelman School of Medicine about planning a class on narrative medicine, a medical approach that uses people’s narratives in clinical practice. “As a woman of color practicing medicine in the 21st century, she has a unique ability to inform the conversation,” he says.

Beavers continues to look for new opportunities to share his love of literature and music with

As far as his next book topic, Beavers is interested in exploring how African American poetry deals

with illness and death. “I came of age during the AIDS crisis, and poets really responded,” he says. “Now they are responding to a lot of the incidences of urban violence, so it’s a question of how poetry confronts issues of public health.”

Beavers has since moved out of Fisher-Bennett Hall to a new office in the Department of Africana Studies. The couch students came to love has been retired, but the same spirit of personal connection and willingness to go above and beyond for his students remains.

“Students are at the center of what we do every day,” says Beavers.

“It’s critical that we help them navigate both the world they’re leaving here, and the one that they’re walking into—and that they always have a voice.”

Courtesy of Herman Beavers

Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies (far left), stands with his August Wilson and Beyond co-teacher Suzana Berger, C’02 (far right), and other collaborators and class members as they accept the first Netter Center Community Engagement Prize.

19

OMNIA

The long history of David Rittenhouse Lab

By David Brainard and Susan Ahlborn Additional research by Camille DiBenedetto

David Brainard is Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences and RRL Professor of Psychology.

20

P

enn alums who return to campus often marvel at its transformation. Renovation projects have rejuvenated buildings like Fisher-Bennett Hall, the home of the English department and the Cinema Studies Program and one of the main teaching spaces on campus. The Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, which opened last year, is a major hub for the social sciences. And the construction of the Carolyn Lynch Laboratory and the Stephen A. Levin Building have advanced the life sciences. Of the 26 buildings that house the people, programs and departments that make up Penn Arts & Sciences, nine are either less than 15 years old or have undergone major renovations in that time.

One place that has remained the same in the midst of all this change is the 65-year-old David Rittenhouse Laboratory (DRL). Since 1954, the Math department, along with Physics and Astronomy, has been housed here, at the southeast corner of 34th and Walnut Streets.

University Archives

FALL/WINTER 2019

Built in two phases, DRL takes up 243,002 square feet and stretches for a city block. It contains the offices and labs of 86 standing faculty, as well as grad students and post-doctoral fellows, and it provides 20 classrooms used by departments across the School.

While the building itself might resemble a 1950s high school, the departments in it have a history of groundbreaking contributions to their fields. Math, as a cornerstone of not just science but of a broader liberal arts education, has continuously played a role in the instruction of virtually all of Penn’s undergraduates. Eight professors have been invited to speak—and one received a repeat invitation—at the International Congress of Mathematicians, the equivalent of a math hall of fame induction. The Physics and Astronomy department, which has recently seen its number of undergraduate majors triple, counts three Nobel prize winners in its family tree.

But a building with history is also a building that was not designed for today’s science. The year that DRL was opened saw the first mass inoculation against polio.

Dwight Eisenhower was president, and a gallon of gas cost 26 cents. Since then, humans have gone from walking on the moon to seeing what a black hole looks like. New discoveries in math allow modern encryption and decryption. Nanotechnology lets us manipulate atoms.

DRL is the legacy of an era when government partnered closely with higher education and invested heavily in facilities.

World War II had just demonstrated the vital importance of science, and the U.S. had entered the technological race of the Cold War. From Harvard to Stanford, a generation of facilities across the country reflect this boom.

Today, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, foundations, and industry continue to fund individual research studies, and in some cases major scientific equipment. But government support for buildings themselves is now greatly reduced, and universities must find other ways to provide the modern facilities that can attract talented faculty and the graduate students that are the lifeblood of a good science department, to make possible cutting-edge research, and to facilitate excellence in teaching in the sciences.

Building modern science facilities of any sort involves unique challenges and great expense.

The size and heavy use of DRL will make the effort to replace or update it particularly daunting.

But to ensure a future at Penn for the Physics and Astronomy and Math departments that is as bright as their past, the conversations have begun.

Here, we take a brief look at DRL, the two departments it houses, and their distinguished past.

1954 building

James R. Edmonds, Jr., AR’12, Architect

“Penn had really built nothing since the Depression set in,” says History of Art’s David Brownlee, coauthor of Building America’s First University: An Historical and Architectural Guide to the University of Pennsylvania.

“The DRL showed a reinvestment in West Philadelphia and an engagement with the new scientific mandates of the late 20th century.

And it’s our first building that really looks like a modern building.”

1967 addition

J. Roy Carroll, AR’26, GAR’28, Architect

“It was in the spirit of what was being called the Philadelphia School.

It’s a building for science that looks picturesque, not rational and regular and repetitive,” says Brownlee.

In 2019…

MATH PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

37 majors graduated » 25 advanced degrees granted » 107 courses offered » 7 Lindback teaching awards to date 37 majors graduated » 17 advanced degrees granted » 72 courses offered » 13 Lindback teaching awards to date

21

OMNIA

1999 Math’s Richard Kadison receives the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society for Lifetime Achievement.

1995

1994

1993

1988

Tom Lubensky of Physics and Astronomy coauthors Principles of Condensed Matter Physics, an influential textbook which defines the field of soft condensed matter physics.

Math’s David Harbater coauthors a proof of Abhyankar’s conjecture, for which he shares the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society.

Magic: The Gathering, the first tradingcard game, debuts and sells out. It’s created by Math’s Richard Garfield, C’85, GR’93, a student of Herbert Wilf.

The Math department hosts first major U.S.-U.S.S.R. mathematics conference in modern times.

1998 Math’s Herbert Wilf receives the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society for Lifetime Achievement.

Stephen Hawking publishes A Brief History of Time.

rk(G/p(G)) ≤ s + 2 g

2000

2002

2005

Former Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alan Heeger shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work done at Penn on conductive polymers with Chemistry Professor Alan MacDiarmid and fellow Hideki Shirakawa.

In Physics and Astronomy, Raymond Davis shares the Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting cosmic neutrinos.

Ron Donagi of Math coauthors a breakthrough paper on producing a Heterotic Standard Model.

2004 Physics and Astronomy’s Philip Nelson publishes his textbook Biological Physics, now a resource for biophysics curricula worldwide.

While filming A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe attends a Math Rademacher Lecture in DRL. No one notices.

2008 The Math department creates the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science Program.

2019 Scientific American covers research led by Physics and Astronomy’s Mirjam Cvetic that finds a “quadrillion” string theory solutions.

Six years of observation of distant galaxies for the Dark Energy Survey ends, beginning world-leading cosmological analyses by Bhuvnesh Jain, Masao Sako, Gary Bernstein, and others in Physics and Astronomy.

We see a picture of a black hole.

Everyone says, “Wow.”

Physics and Astronomy’s Charles Kane and Eugene Mele receive the Breakthrough Prize for their work on topological insulators, which conduct electricity only on their surfaces.

Physics and Astronomy’s Mark Devlin and his group begin work on an 8,000-pound large aperture telescope receiver destined for the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert.

Credits (chronological): University Archives; University Archives; Carlos Moreno Rekondo, Creative Commons; Pixabay; Dutch National Archives; NASA; Lunch, Creative Commons; Public Domain; Jeffq, Creative Commons; iStock; Mikko Saari, Creative Commons; Bill William Compton, Creative Commons; NASA; Felice Macera; NASA;

22

FALL/WINTER 2019

1954 The new physics and mathematics building opens. It’s named after David Rittenhouse, an inventor, astronomer, professor, and surveyor, second in awesomeness only to his friend Ben Franklin. An addition is completed in 1967 (see box p. 21).

1957

1960

1963

1969

Physics and Astronomy gets funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to construct an accelerator with Princeton.

In Physics and Astronomy, Eli Burstein helps lead the creation of Penn’s interdisciplinary Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter. The center has been continuously funded and is currently led by Arjun Yodh.

Math’s Murray Gerstenhaber discovers an algebraic structure that will be named for him.

Humans land on the moon.

USSR launches Sputnik I.

1985

1982

1977

Math’s Peter Freyd and his student David Yetter are co-discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial, a knot invariant in the mathematical field of knot theory.

Math’s Eugenio Calabi is inducted into the National Academy of Sciences for accomplishments including the development of the Calabi conjecture, which led to Calabi-Yau manifolds.

Voyager I and II launch.

Physics and Astronomy’s Paul Steinhardt and his student Andreas Albrecht formulate the first viable inflationary theory of the universe.

Star Trek premieres.

1972 1973

1980

The first publickey cryptosystem is used for secure data transmission.

Richard Feynman proposes quantum computing.

Physics and Astronomy’s John Robert Schrieffer shares the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.

2010

2012

Using modern techniques, Math’s Philip Gressman and Robert Strain solve the 140-year-old Boltzmann equation.

Voyager I enters interstellar space.

2011

NASA confirms the presence of large quantities of water ice on the north pole of the Moon.

Andrea Liu of Physics and Astronomy identifies defects that mediate flow in solids ranging from crystalline to completely disordered, enabling microscopic understanding of how solids deform and ultimately break if pushed too far.

2009 Following the arrival of Mark Trodden and Justin Khoury, Physics and Astronomy establishes the Center for Particle Cosmology to address questions about the universe and fundamental theories of matter and energy.

1966

Math’s Antonella Grassi develops a program to study elliptic fibrations with Julius Shaneson. Their findings inspire a completely new formulation of F-theory in physics.

2016 2018 Math’s Robert Ghrist begins publishing Calculus BLUE, 25 hours of free animated video lectures for multivariable calculus.

He and his team, in partnership with Honeywell Intl., also develop powerful new methods arising from algebraic topology.

Math’s Charles Epstein receives the Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society for fundamental contributions including his research on a relative index on the space of embeddable Cauchy-Riemann structures.

Physics and Astronomy’s Eugene Beier and Joshua Klein are part of the SNO collaboration that shares in a Breakthrough Prize for their work on neutrino oscillations.

Hidden Figures hits theaters.

2014 2015 Math’s Tony Pantev and Ron Donagi are selected to lead the Simons Collaboration for Homological Mirror Symmetry (HMS), a group exploring HMS and its applications.

In Math, Florian Pop helps to prove the full Oort Conjecture on cyclic covers, while Ted Chinburg and David Harbater advance knowledge on the non-cyclic group.

Brooke Sietinsons; Courtesy of Antonella Grassi; Public Domain; Courtesy of University Communications; NASA; Eric Sucar; Dark Energy Survey Collaboration; NASA; University Communications

23

OMNIA

Recovery and Rejuvenation Penn’s Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities builds alliances with Native Americans to restore Indigenous knowledge systems and languages.

By Jane Carroll Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

24

FALL/WINTER 2019

L

anguage is an intrinsic part of culture and an essential way of sharing customs, knowledge, and belief systems. But in North America, Indigenous people historically were forced by the U.S. and Canadian governments to abandon their languages. Today, many Indigenous communities are engaging in a painstaking process of language recovery and rejuvenation. Penn’s Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities (EPIC) was created to support this effort.

The headline speaker at last April’s conference was LaDonna Brave Bull Allard.

A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a tribal historian, Brave Bull Allard founded the first resistance camp to the Dakota Access Pipeline on her family’s land along the Cannonball River in 2016. She spoke about waking each morning during the encampment to the sound of people singing and telling stories in dozens of Indigenous tongues: “None of them were speaking English—to me that was power.”

“That first meeting kicked things into motion, and we are now following up with a white paper for the NEH in which we will articulate our action plan for moving forward,” says Frei, who is also Executive Director of Language Instruction and Chair of the Penn Language Center. A second meeting planned for April 2020 will provide an opportunity to articulate specific tribal needs and identify common

themes for the next NEH grant proposal— such as digital repatriation, land equity, professionalization, and establishing long-term alliances among the partners.

We want to approach this partnership based on what our partners need.

To build trust and ask how Penn can facilitate their needs, as well as recognize the knowledge they have to share about critical issues such as climate change.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Margaret Bruchac says it’s significant that another speaker at the first EPIC conference was Curtis Zunigha, founder of the Lenape Center in New York City.

The University sits on land once occupied by the Lenape people.

“It’s crucial for educational institutions like Penn to not only acknowledge who these people are—whose territory this is Courtesy American Philosophical Society

Part of the Penn Language Center, EPIC was established through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) with a mission to share knowledge and resources with Indigenous communities while working to expand the number of Indigenous languages offered for instruction at the University. It was developed by the late Timothy Powell, a senior lecturer in religious studies.

Dakota. A two-day conference in April 2019, Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Revitalization, Resistance, and Regeneration, provided the first opportunity for EPIC’s partners to come together on campus.

“EPIC brings together language educators, curriculum developers, and scholars from Native American communities and the humanities at Penn,” says EPIC Director Christina Frei.

To date, EPIC has established working relationships with members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the Tuscarora Nation in New York, the M’Chigeeng First Nation (Ojibwe) on Manitoulin Island (Ontario), the Fond du Lac Band (Chippewa) in Wisconsin, the Six Nations Haudenosaunee in Ontario, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North

“Dakota Play on Words” sample by Dakota scholar Ella C. Deloria 25

OMNIA

The Penn Museum stewards material culture collections representing many Native American nations and histories. Stephanie Mach, Collections Coordinator, holds a beaded Kiowa toy cradle in the Museum’s Mainwaring study and storage wing.

and what the history is—but to also find ways to bring them into the contemporary conversation,” she says. Bruchac coordinates Penn’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and is a consultant to EPIC; the American Section at the Penn Museum; and the American Philosophical Society (APS), based in Philadelphia. A member of the Abenaki tribe, Bruchac was awarded tenure this year, making her the first tenured Native American faculty member at Penn Arts & Sciences—Frei sees this appointment as a strong signal of the University’s commitment to Native American and Indigenous Studies.

A key component of the EPIC initiative is digital repatriation—the scanning and digitizing of materials such as recordings and transcriptions of language so they can be easily shared with Indigenous communities. This is something that Powell had been deeply involved in through his longtime association with APS. “The APS is the largest resource for our tribal partners, with a comprehensive archive of Indigenous language 26

collections,” Frei notes. “For many of our partners, particularly the Cherokee and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, there are not that many fluent speakers of the languages left.”

The Penn Museum is a vital resource for Indigenous people and an essential partner for EPIC. Stephanie Mach, a doctoral student in museum anthropology, a member of the Navajo Nation, and part of the Museum’s Academic Engagement staff, says, “EPIC is essentially about ensuring access to Indigenous people’s own heritage. The overall goal is cultural revitalization, knowledge recovery, and regeneration, and the materials stewarded by the Museum are an integral part of that process. I appreciate knowing that Penn supports Indigenous communities in this way.”

Frei and Bruchac see EPIC as a vehicle for long-term, equitable collaborations between Penn and Indigenous communities.

Margaret Bruchac, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Penn

Alex Schein

FALL/WINTER 2019

A LEGACY OF RECIPROCITY The elements of recovery and reciprocity were of paramount importance for EPIC founder, the late Timothy Powell. In a 2016 article for Museum Anthropology Review, he recalled learning about “community-based scholarship” from Richard Hill, then-Director of the Deyhahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Center at Six Nations Polytechnic in Ontario.

Powell wrote: “The success of community-based scholarship depends on reimagining the relationship between the academic knowledge systems and the knowledge systems maintained by traditional knowledge keepers and community members who are working to pass the teachings on to the next generation. The goal is to foster a new, sustainable relationship whereby educators in both systems respect the validity of each other’s knowledge in order to craft mutually beneficial partnerships to improve the quality of education in both systems.”

Christina Frei, Academic Director for Penn Language Center and Director of EPIC (center), greets members of the Gibson family from the Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre in Ontario.

“The University could facilitate access to materials at APS and objects in the Penn Museum, and resources in the Language Center or other departments, so that it can be a real back-and-forth,” says Bruchac. She also envisions an interdisciplinary course encompassing history, anthropology, folklore, and education that engages Indigenous language experts.

“Through these encounters, we could find ways to create residencies for Indigenous scholars who might want to do research here at Penn,” she says. “Picture inviting an elder who runs language recovery in his or her community to come here for a week or two, do research at APS and the Museum, teach and meet with faculty and students, and then go back to their communities renewed with information they can use for their own educational, cultural, or linguistic purposes.”

Frei notes that the Penn Language Center has the flexibility to appoint language instructors to teach Indigenous American languages, provided there is

demonstrated interest on the part of at least five students. Currently, Penn offers instruction in Quechua—the most widely spoken Indigenous language of South America—but no North American languages; Frei says Lenape would make sense as a starting point.

“I think what I’m most proud of, as far as continuing Tim Powell’s legacy, is that EPIC is starting a process of healing,” says Frei. “We want to approach this partnership based on what our partners need. To build trust and ask how the University of Pennsylvania can facilitate their needs, as well as recognize the knowledge they have to share about critical issues such as climate change.”

“We want to help ensure that the public becomes more aware of the survivance and visibility of multiple and richly diverse Native Nations,” adds Bruchac, “each with its own distinctive history and deserving of understanding on its own terms.”

Students interested in studying Indigenous American languages are encouraged to contact the Penn Language Center (PLC.SAS.UPENN.EDU).

27

OMNIA

As part of an effort from MindCORE to get research out of the lab and into the community, the research group of behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Brannon spent the summer conducting two studies at the Academy of Natural Sciences to better understand how children learn.

By Michele W. Berger Photos by Brooke Sietinsons

28

FALL/WINTER 2019

I

n an exploration room at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, across from a life-size tree (fake) and next to the Eurasian legless and chuckwalla lizards (very real), Rosa Rugani and Nuwar Ahmed line up plastic blue Solo cups on a folding table covered with a soft grey blanket. The bright cups immediately appeal to the young audience wandering the room with their parents. Within minutes, the table is swamped with four- and five-year-olds— and that’s precisely the idea.

Rugani and Ahmed work with behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Brannon, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Natural Sciences. They’re at the museum as part of a Living Labs initiative modeled after the National Science Foundation program of the same name. This summer, the team spent several weekends at the Academy, teaching museumgoers about some of Penn’s work in the field of brain science. They also ran two experiments that tie directly into Brannon’s broad research focus on non-verbal numerical representations.

“I’m interested in the foundations of our mathematical mind: how babies come into the world with a sense of quantity, what kind they have, and how that then gets morphed into a more elaborate > Brannon

lab manager Nora Bradford (L) watches a young participant play the foraging game, the object of which is to collect as many coins as possible before time runs out.

representation when children learn to count and use number words,” explains Brannon.

Three such community-based efforts happened this summer, supported by MindCORE, a broad umbrella for mind and brain research across Penn.

Beyond the Brannon Lab, the Academy also hosted a team led by Professor of Psychology John Trueswell, a psycholinguist who collected data on how children learn labels and what words mean. And at the Please Touch Museum across town, MindCORE postdoc Julia Leonard conducted research on what factors affect whether young children decide to persist with a challenge. It’s the kind of outreach that is core to the mission of MindCORE. “We’ve been talking about minds in the wild, bringing research out of the lab,” says Heather Calvert, MindCORE executive director. “The work

at the museum does just that, and it’s exciting.

When people go to science museums, they typically see the end of research, but this allows them to see—and be part of—the process.”

FEEDING THE DINO Four-and-a-half-year-old Robby can hardly contain himself. He’s made a beeline to the cup table and he’s ready to help Danny the Dino find her food. For the researchers, he’s the day’s first participant, and his mom and sister sit behind him watching his progress.

“When I hide the fish under a cup, you’re going to get Danny and point her nose where the fish is,” explains Ahmed, one of Brannon’s lab managers, “’cause she’s gonna be very hungry.” Rugani, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Michael Platt, James S. Riepe University Professor,

OMNIA

Brannon lab manager Nuwar Ahmed (R) plays the cup game with a young participant. The object is to “feed” the dino a fish hidden under a different cup each round. The researchers then watch to see how many tries it takes the children to find the fish.

I’m interested in the foundations of our mathematical mind: how babies come into the world with a sense of quantity, what kind they have, and how that then gets morphed into a more elaborate representation when children learn to count and use number words. whose expertise spans the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and marketing, sits behind the table, tallying rounds of hide and seek, watching how the location of the fish influences how quickly the child can find it.

Though the research is still in its early days, its aim is to broaden our understanding of the relationship between numbers and space. “Imagine back to kindergarten and think about how the number line in the front of the classroom goes from left to right on the wall. Or think about a ruler, which also goes from left to right,” Brannon says.

“We naturally map quantity onto space and organize it in a particular orientation.

30

But there are a lot of questions about why that is and what kind of bias there might be toward the left side.”

Rugani has previously done comparable work with days-old chicks to study spatial-numerical associations and gauge whether very young animals can solve tasks related to positioning within a series.

Brannon has asked similar questions about non-human primates like rhesus macaques.

Preliminarily, the work as a whole points to a left-side preference regarding spatial number representation—but there’s much more work to do before any final conclusions can be drawn.

STAY OR GO? The second pop-up study at the Academy of Natural Sciences, another collaboration between the Brannon and Platt labs, uses a foraging game played on a tablet to evaluate children’s decision making and numerical acuity, or the ability to differentiate between and compare items in a set. The object of the game is for a participant to collect as many coins as possible before time runs out.

FALL/WINTER 2019

Courtesy of Elizabeth Brannon

Elizabeth Brannon, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Natural Sciences

Cattycorner from the cup experiment, on the same summer day, Emily Kopp, C’22, and Brannon lab manager Nora Bradford run the game for half a dozen children.

During the timed collection process, children must decide how to gather coins, either by staying in a tree whose pot gradually diminishes or moving to the next, which will be plentiful but will cost time to get to.

Kopp and Bradford see children using each of these strategies, and age seems to factor into whether that approach stays consistent during both rounds of play. For example, five-year-old Gwen accumulates several handfuls of coins in one tree before moving to the next, a tactic she employs even when it takes just a single second to get to the next tree. But 10-year-old Sofia figures out immediately that in her second round, it’s quicker to move between trees than during the first, so she shifts her strategy and scores much higher than Gwen.

“The children are sensitive to the travel time it takes to go from one tree to another,” he says. “As the trees are situated farther and farther away, they tend to spend a lot more time in the tree they’re in. It’s costly to move from one tree to another.”

Brannon is also watching how each child completes the game for clues about their non-verbal numerical acuity. “A lot of our work shows that there are big individual differences even before children can estimate,” she says.

“We see that they vary in their sensitivity to numerical differences, and we’re interested in whether those differences might predict a propensity to explore or exploit.”

In the case of the coin experiment, it’s the difference between “exploiting” a single tree over and over or “exploring” multiple trees.

PULLING BACK THE SCIENTIFIC CURTAIN Doing this kind of experimental work in a museum setting makes the science accessible to many more people than the small subset who opt to come into a lab. Plus, it provides a built-in process for getting study subjects. For Brannon, it’s been a great experience.

“I’m hoping we can continue at the museum to pilot ideas that can be turned into full-blown studies,” she says. “It’s a really fast way to pilot ideas.”

In the future, there’s potential for taking this kind of collaboration beyond museums to settings like farmers markets, public parks—any place families gather and might be enticed to learn about science for a few minutes.

“It’s a combination of research and outreach,” Calvert says. “People get naturally curious when they participate in an experiment.”

That’s abundantly clear as child after child visits the pair of experiments at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Many are drawn to Danny the Dino—a few abscond with her momentarily.

Faces exhibit pure curiosity as they slow down to watch a peer playing the tablet foraging game.

Parents linger and ask questions, not just about their own child but about the work in general, before continuing on to nearby tanks filled with a tarantula and cockroaches. The work pulls back the scientific curtain, offering an approachable window into something that most often happens behind closed doors.

Sofia’s actions line up with what Platt Lab postdoc Arjun Ramakrishnan, who helped design the tasks, expected to see based on preliminary findings. > Brannon

Lab managers Rosa Rigani (L) and Nuwar Ahmed 31

OMNIA

ADVANCING FACULTY DISTINCTION Our faculty are essential to excellence across the University, and we take full advantage of every opportunity to sustain and strengthen a diverse group of dynamic, collaborative scholars and teachers.

Through their research and teaching, faculty shape what it means to be at Penn Arts & Sciences. Since the campaign began, scholarly leaders and expert practitioners have joined the ranks of our already excellent faculty, giving students opportunities including working in labs alongside world-renowned scientists, taking a class with a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and collaborating with industry leaders to tackle real-world problems.

It’s been a year and a half since we launched the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign and already the School has grown in extraordinary ways. Our priorities reflect some of the world’s most pressing challenges and needs.

I cannot think of a better place for our outstanding students and faculty to meet these challenges and create the future of their fields. I celebrate what we’ve accomplished since the campaign began and I’m eager to see how we continue to make progress toward our ambitious goals.

- Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience 32

We will continue to enhance our resources to recruit and retain the very best, through prestigious endowed chairs and other forms of faculty support including professors of practice and artists-inresidence. Matching funds are available to endow Penn Integrates Knowledge professorships, as well as Presidential Distinguished and Presidential professorships.

REALIZING STUDENT POTENTIAL Penn Arts & Sciences teaches every undergraduate at the University, fostering the traits that distinguish Penn graduates: adults driven by curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, who understand context and know how to communicate.

Support for our students comes in many forms, and the most elemental is our need-blind, all-grant financial aid. Offering this kind of

scholarship support means that we can admit the brightest students, who are able to graduate without burdening themselves with debt.

Since April 2018, 54 new scholarships have been established for students in the College.

We will continue to promote access, diversity, and opportunity through expanded resources for scholarships and for curricular innovation that will catalyze learning in every field. We seek to do this by creating additional scholarships for College students and raising funds for programs that enhance their educational experiences.

CREATING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET The urgent need to revolutionize our thinking about energy can no longer be disputed. Scientific advances, combined with a deeper understanding of human interactions with the natural world, form the path to sustainable solutions to society’s energy needs.

Energy science at Penn got a major boost in the form of a $50 million gift from P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99, and Diana T. Vagelos, PAR’90. The gift, the largest in Penn Arts & Sciences history, is for a new building that will connect physical scientists and engineers to solve scientific and technological problems related to energy.

Naming gifts are available to support the construction of the building. In addition, the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, an Arts & Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Science collaboration that fosters integrative basic research, is seeking gifts to endow faculty seed grants or graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

FALL/WINTER 2019

EXPLORING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE BRAIN New technologies have brought about an unprecedented ability to understand brain activity.

The next wave of research holds the potential to unlock insights into phenomena that span from decision making to the fundamental nature of human intelligence and to advance understanding and treatment of brain disorders.

Brain research has advanced tremendously in recent years, but deciphering the complex relationship between brain activity and behavior remains a compelling scientific challenge. MindCORE’s emphasis on collaboration enables the use of technology and methodology that no single lab could support on its own, such as the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for social science research. With MRI, researchers can see brain activity as people make decisions, solve problems, or write music, allowing greater insight into the complexity always at work in the human brain.

We will create additional opportunities for students and faculty to move brain and mind research forward with support for MindCORE’s imaging facility and application of natural science tools to social science questions.

Engagement with culture, history, and creativity enriches individuals’ lives and speaks to the essence of what it means to be human. By combining traditional methods of inquiry with powerful new technologyand data-driven tools, we are opening new horizons in understanding a complex, interconnected world.

The Price Lab for Digital Humanities, funded by a gift from Campaign Chair Michael Price, W’79, and Vikki Price, supports innovative uses of technology in the study of history, art, and culture. Since its formation, the Price Lab has funded projects including Monument Lab, a city-wide public art installation, and supported research like the development of high-accuracy digital tools for archaeological fieldwork. The Lab offers the resources, training, and expertise that allowed the College to launch a digital humanities minor so that students across the liberal arts can apply advanced digital research techniques to their work.

We will continue to strengthen humanistic inquiry and appreciation of diverse perspectives through cross-disciplinary faculty recruitment, support of centers, and investment in the new frontiers of the humanities. There are opportunities to support students and faculty centers and programs including the Center for Africana Studies and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.

THE ARTS & SCIENCES ANNUAL FUND DRIVING GLOBAL CHANGE The forces of globalization give rise to issues that transcend national boundaries. With a wealth of global expertise and perspectives embedded in our faculty, and a community committed to engagement, Penn Arts & Sciences is well positioned to advance both global understanding and solutions.

The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration (CSERI) is the first of its kind and positions Penn as a leader in the progressive study of immigration and race. A campaign gift from David E. Schulman, C’82, L’85, and Suzanne E. Turner, C’82, parents, created the Turner Schulman Endowed Research Fund to support graduate and undergraduate research. It’s a gift that strengthens the Center’s status as a hub for inquiry and education.

The Arts & Sciences Annual Fund provides the School with the immediate, unrestricted funds that support our students and faculty. The growth of the annual fund means the expansion of education and research opportunities across the liberal arts and provides a way for anyone to participate in the campaign, at any level.

To learn more about the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences and ways to support our priorities, contact: Laura Weber, Assistant Vice Dean of Advancement, lweber@sas.upenn.edu.

We will continue to make investments in our faculty and in innovative projects that will broaden the horizons of our students and strengthen Penn’s impact in communities around the world. There are giving opportunities to support students and faculty in centers including CSERI, the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, the Center for Africana Studies, and the Center for the Advanced Study of India.

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OMNIA

WHATEVER YOU SAY,

FALL/WINTER 2019

Brendan O’Leary’s career, from aiding in the negotiating of peace in Northern Ireland to advising the Prime Minister of Kurdistan, has been guided by a simple principle: say exactly what you mean.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Holly and Lime

rendan O’Leary is waging academic warfare. And trying his hand at comedy.

Both efforts are restricted to the endnotes in his recently published three-volume history of Northern Ireland. “After all,” he reasons, “you should be rewarded for going to the endnotes.”

O’Leary’s endnotes—the pages of annotations and explication that come after the main text—are where he dismisses a historian’s claims as lacking any textual justification and muses on folk memory in lyrics by Irish punk bands. But the endnotes aren’t the only unconventional part of this history. In the 1,240 pages of text, O’Leary’s training as a social scientist, as well as his commitment to thoroughness and his personal story, is present. For him, it’s a matter of principle.

For the reader, it’s something that challenges typical treatments of Northern Ireland. It’s a history, but not written by a historian.

“I strongly believe in objectivity and reject the idea that everyone has their own facts,” O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, explains. “But, I think it is incumbent on social scientists and historians to indicate where they come from, literally and figuratively, and how their views might potentially be challenged and how they might be wrong.”

The question of where O’Leary comes from is complicated. Born in 1958 in Ireland’s County Cork to Donal O’Leary, Sr., a scientist, and Margery O’Mahony O’Leary, a civil servant, he moved with his family to Nigeria at just 13 months old. Donal later worked for the U.N. as a geochemist, overseeing the construction of laboratories. At the

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, at the Cushendun Caves in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

35

Courtesy of Brendan O’Leary

OMNIA

start of the Nigerian Civil War, the family, including siblings Mary, Raymond, Lynda, and Donal, Jr., returned to Ireland, this time settling in the North.

There, they faced another conflict born from ethnic tension: The Troubles.

I think it is incumbent on social scientists and historians to

indicate where they come from, literally and figuratively,

and how their views

might potentially be

challenged and how

they might be wrong.

The Troubles, often misunderstood as a religious clash between the local Protestant majority and the Catholic 36

minority, was fought between British military and police forces and republican and loyalist militias, each claiming to fight for the rights of their communities. Civilians bore the brunt of the violence for decades. Coding the conflict as religious is convenient for some, O’Leary argues, because it masks the history of British imperialism in Ireland. Nonetheless, the divide between Catholics and Protestants was stark.

“When I arrived in Northern Ireland, I was an outsider,” he remembers. “You can either be welcomed or treated in a hostile way, and I was treated in a hostile way by both main communities, for different reasons.”

Everything about O’Leary gave off conflicting ethnic tells.

For one thing, the influence of his Cork-born parents and

his time in Nigeria made his accent hard to place in his new home in the North. For another, his name identified him as Catholic, but he and his sister attended a school otherwise exclusively populated by Protestants. People could not place him.

The study of conflicts shaped O’Leary’s life and career in ways he can only guess at. “Would I have applied to Oxford if it had not been for the conflict?” he wonders. “It’s an interesting question. I did not want to be in Belfast in the middle of that intensity. My decision to go to Oxford meant that I knew my career would likely be outside of Ireland.”

O’Leary’s career has indeed been largely outside of Ireland: school at Keble College, Oxford University, and professorships at the London School of Economics and Penn, as well

as roles as a political and constitutional advisor to the U.N., the EU, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, the Governments of the U.K. and Ireland, and the British Labour Party. His wife, Lori Salem, is American, and his daughters, Anna, Hana, ENG’20, and Leila, C’20, are respectively English, American, and American. But Ireland has remained the driving force in his work.

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, shares a collection of childhood photos taken from 1959 to 1976, taking him from Country Cork, Ireland to Kaduna, Nigeria and County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

FALL/WINTER 2019

History, Down to a Science O’Leary’s treatise on Northern Ireland was a massive undertaking. So massive, in fact, that he wouldn’t have taken on the challenge of covering five centuries of history, had it not happened organically. What began as a revision of his 1993 book, The Politics of Antagonism, fused with a separate book project on the Good Friday Agreement, the formal end to The Troubles. The result is A Treatise on Northern Ireland, a collection of three volumes, each organized around a theoretical concept: colonialism, control, and consociation, the third being a form of power-sharing.

“I respect historical conventions,” he says. “But I think I have a valuable contribution to make in showing how the historiography fits in relation to these three concepts, and I organize the historical material around them quite explicitly. I’m not making any epistemological error or committing some methodological crime in doing so, though there might be historians who disagree,” he admits.

The first and longest volume of the Treatise covers the long reach of colonialism.

Its non-linear organization demonstrates O’Leary’s concept-driven approach.

Beginning with a chapter titled “An Audit of Violence after 1966,” it brings readers to the present day. Two chapters later, O’Leary expounds on the far-reaching implications of the 1603 surrender of Aodh Mór Ó Néill, an Irish earl who led an ill-fated rebellion.

“That’s deliberate,” he says.

“That’s being a social scientist.”

I respect historical conventions. But I

think I have a valuable contribution to make in showing how the

historiography fits in

relation to theoretical

concepts, and I organize the historical material around them quite explicitly.

“What I’m doing is reminding the readers of the intensity of the conflict in Western Europe at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.

I outline that in considerable statistical and political and moral depth. I have to explain precisely what happened, then the rest of the three volumes are a response to that—why did it happen?”

The second and third volumes address the “what” and “why.”

O’Leary details the powers

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, in the village of Cushendall in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

that have influenced Northern Ireland since its formation in 1920, arguing that control of Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority depended on a formal system of segmentation (isolating and fragmenting the population), dependence (economic and social vulnerability), and co-option (incorporating some elite members of the otherwise vulnerable population).

Here, O’Leary’s work draws on

arguments developed by a colleague in the Department of Political Science: Ian Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Professor and expert in Middle Eastern politics.

Lastly, the third volume addresses how relative peace came to Northern Ireland through a consociational approach involving executive, legislative, and judicial

~50,000 The latest round of armed conflict in Northern Ireland—O’Leary rejects the commonly used name, The Troubles, as euphemistic—began in 1966. But, it had roots earlier in the 20th century, when rebellion and war concluded in the British partition of the island of Ireland into two distinct entities: Ireland (also known as the Republic) and Northern Ireland. Combatants in the conflict ostensibly represented the predominantly Catholic Irish nationalists or republicans, who wanted the North to reunify with Ireland as a single, sovereign nation, and the predominantly Protestant British unionists or loyalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, along with England, Scotland, and Wales.

SERIOUSLY INJURED

BETWEEN 1968 AND 2011

~4,000 DEATHS

2/3

OF THE DEAD WERE CIVILIANS

1/2

WERE KILLED IN BELFAST

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The poet Seamus Heaney titled a popular poem: "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing." It was a warning akin to U.S. wartime slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships.”

But in Northern Ireland, the phrase informed daily civilian life. In times of conflict, O’Leary’s Treatise and Heaney’s poem explain, your name, your address, and your school can give away who you are.

Better in that case to remain silent, practicing what Heaney calls, “the famous / Northern reticence, the tight gag of place / And times.” O’Leary’s open approach to scholarship on Northern Ireland, which weaves in his background, is a rebuke to the culture of silence enforced by The Troubles.

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, at his home in Philadelphia.

power-sharing across Catholic, republican and Protestant, loyalist communities. In the North, these communities were not always recognized by their opponents. Members of the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Féin had opposing agendas, the former refused to speak with representatives of the latter. Rather than declaring a victor to take the spoils, consociation results from negotiated bargaining.

Organizing Northern Ireland’s history around these concepts took considerable homework and revision over a roughly 12-year period. O’Leary read prodigiously, conducted interviews, and did archival research. He estimates that about half of what he writes gets deleted as he edits himself.

“I have to test my interpretations; I have to see where they might be wrong,” he says.

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“How will people object? At each stage, I am constantly interrogating myself.”

Given the contentious nature of Northern Ireland’s history, he’s aware that even the terms he uses are up for debate.

Each of his three volumes begins with a lengthy glossary and preface on terminology.

He takes care to define the part of Ireland he’s writing about: Northern Ireland, not the “Six Counties” or “Ulster,” as preferred by republicans and loyalists, respectively.

“I regard it as partly an exercise in intellectual integrity, and partly as a way of helping the reader into matters,” O’Leary explains. “Definitional and interpretive matters frequently intersect, so it’s very important at the outset of the Treatise that I explain how I’m going to use terms. Some people in Northern Ireland will think that they know

everything about what’s going to follow simply on the basis of how I define things. That doesn’t concern me.”

O’Leary’s authorial confidence and matter-of-fact acknowledgment of potential detractors are the results of decades of research, writing, and experience. “In a certain sense it’s an older man’s book,” he says. “I don’t have to write to get tenure, I don’t have to conform to every professional norm.”

Though his book is intellectually rigorous and indefatigably researched and referenced, O’Leary most notably deviates from the norm with a playful approach to language. “Love of Latin has melted like the snows of yesteryear,” he laments. “Try saying ‘archipelagic’ with any variety of Ulster accent,” he jokes. Remembering a Victorian historian from a high school reading assignment, he writes, “I found him

nauseating.” In his acknowledgments, O’Leary references an old academic dispute, saying, “Having once been described by the late Keith Jeffery as part of a team of academic carnivores, perhaps I need to declare that scholars are not fit for consumption, raw or cooked, though they often make for good reading.”

“All answers to the question of why the Irish are known for their writing tend to be flattering to the Irish themselves, so I’m going to be guilty of that,” he admits. “But the presence of idioms and rhythms from Irish—Gaelige—went into how the Irish speak English. We write in the English language with a sense of our own distinct cultural difference, even if it’s the narcissism of minor differences, and maybe we want to show the English that we can perform in their language better than they can.”

Brooke Sietinsons

OMNIA

Courtesy of Brendan O’Leary

FALL/WINTER 2019

Portrait of the Scholar O’Leary’s career has been a mix of steady progression and surprising zigzags. After earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford, he went on to a doctorate in political science from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he then received an academic appointment in 1988, at age 25.

Early in his career at LSE, he received a letter that sparked a reunion and decades-long writing partnership.

“I was sent an article, through snail mail in those days,” he remembers. It was accompanied by a note from the author, John McGarry, saying that their views were similar.

O’Leary recalled a high school classmate with the same name, but that John had been more interested in boxing than academic pursuits.

“I wrote back to him saying, ‘Dear John, remarkably similar, you’re absolutely right. We are very convergent. You couldn’t possibly be the John McGarry I went to school with. You have the same name as him. You’re different, you must be a different character. Where do you come from?’”

The reply came back: “Dear Brendan, I can understand why you might think I’m not that John McGarry, but I am that John McGarry.”

Once reconnected, O’Leary and McGarry, by then a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and, like his former classmate, a scholar of power-sharing in contested areas, began to write together. They have co-written

or co-edited 10 books together, published journal and newspaper articles, and presented at conferences.

“We developed a long-lasting friendship,” O’Leary says.

“Perhaps it was easy for us to work together, because we had a similar formation and were at opposite sides of the Atlantic at that stage. It’s been incredibly fruitful, I hope for both of us.”

O’Leary and McGarry, though living outside of Ireland, were deeply involved in the processes of peacemaking and reform that dominated the political landscape of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Britain in the ’90s.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the formal end to The Troubles, was a complex political achievement. In the run up, O’Leary was an advisor to Britain’s Labour Party, which, at the time, was led by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Negotiated between the British and Irish governments and eight political parties from Northern Ireland, the Agreement’s articles addressed a sweeping number of issues, including the establishment of cross-border political and cultural institutions, the decommissioning of weapons held by paramilitary groups, and the right of people from Northern Ireland to identify, be accepted, and hold citizenship as Irish, British, or both. Police reform was identified as integral to peace, though what that might look like remained unknown.

In the years following the Agreement, O’Leary became a prominent voice in academic and popular discussions of police reform in Northern Ireland. In 1999, he and McGarry published Policing Northern Ireland: Proposals

(Top to bottom) Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, pointing to the Zagros Mountains in Kurdistan; working for Chatham House in South Sudan and Sudan; and chairing a U.N. General Assembly seminar on mediation.

for a New Start. Many of their recommendations, including renaming the police force and recruiting more Catholic and female officers, were taken up by the Independent Commission on Policing. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) launched in 2001 and, by 2007, was officially endorsed by all of Northern Ireland’s political parties.

The Agreement and reform that followed are largely considered successful peace negotiations and strong examples of consociation, the form of power-sharing O’Leary details in the third volume of his Treatise. Since 1998, Northern Ireland has remained ethnically and religiously divided, but until 2016 had maintained

stable democratic rule without returning to the sustained violence of The Troubles.

I gave the talk, and

afterwards the Prime

Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister of the

Kurdistan region asked me, would I be willing to advise them if the

Americans removed

Saddam from power?

In 2001, as the PSNI launched, O’Leary came to Penn as a visiting professor. Recalling his visit, he says that Penn “made an offer I couldn’t refuse,” and he joined the faculty the next year. Early in his tenure in 39

OMNIA the Department of Political Science, he received another message that changed the direction of his career.

The email came from Khaled Salih, an academic whom O’Leary had exchanged a few emails with in the early ’90s. Salih asked him to visit the University of Southern Denmark and give a lecture on 10 years of Iraqi Kurdistan. When O’Leary pointed out that he was not an expert in Kurdish or Iraqi politics, Salih encouraged him to apply knowledge about power-sharing in Northern Ireland to this new context.

Intrigued, O’Leary agreed to the trip.

“I gave the talk, and afterwards the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region asked me, would I be willing to advise them if the Americans removed Saddam from power?” O’Leary remembers. “I said ‘yes,’ assuming that the Americans were not going to remove Saddam! With the support of Penn, I was in Kurdistan for most of the first half of 2004, and again for a lengthy period in 2005. This was during the making of the transitional administrative law and then the making of Iraq’s constitution. These were some of the most remarkably interesting experiences of my life.”

O’Leary’s work in Kurdistan led to his being part of the U.N. Standby Team, a group he jokingly refers to as the A-Team, with experienced negotiators, conflict specialists and mediators from around the world. As part of this group, he was an advisor in the Darfur peace process and a participant in talks that preceded the breakup of Sudan.

Reflecting on working with the U.N., the same organization for which his father worked in his childhood, O’Leary remembers a joke his father told him: “Brendan, there are three great lies: The check is in the post, My wife doesn’t understand me, and I’m from the United Nations and I’m here to help you.”

“I tried in my own way when working for the U.N. to make that last joke untrue.

But I would argue that people like me, whether lawyers, political scientists, or human rights specialists, are more useful in working for governments or working for rebel parties or dissidents in negotiations. All such work is important, because it’s easier to have good bridges and good hospitals if you have decent government.”

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Don’t Call It Brexit The 2016 U.K. EU membership referendum got O’Leary up in the middle of the night, and he’s been thinking about it ever since.

“I went to bed on the 23rd of June thinking that the outcome was going to be 52–48 to stay,” he remembers. “I was in Cushendall, Northern Ireland and I got up at four in the morning and saw that the result had gone the other way. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was scheduled to speak at a public seminar on the referendum at Queen’s University Belfast, and my mind was already applying power-sharing logics. By the following day, I was writing an op-ed on how Scotland and Northern Ireland could remain in the EU for the United Kingdom while England and Wales left.”

O’Leary has continued writing and speaking about the results of the referendum and potential power-sharing compromises that may ease matters, appearing on NPR and RadioWharton, as well as in The Irish Times, Guardian, and HuffPost.

One of his main talking points? Under the terms of the referendum, it’s not just Britain that would be exiting the EU. “I insist on calling it ‘UKexit,” he says.

“Which, fittingly, sounds like a vomit projectile. I insist on it for a good reason. Britain is not the same as the United Kingdom.”

The U.K. is made up of England, Scotland, and Wales, all on the island of Britain, and Northern Ireland. Though 62 percent of Scottish voters and 55.8 percent of Northern Irish voters voted to remain part of the EU, the overall vote determined the path for the U.K. as a whole. A majority of English and Welsh voters chose to leave the EU (53.4 percent and 52.5 percent, respectively). “So,” O’Leary explains, “English politicians insist, Northern Ireland and Scotland must leave, too.”

O’Leary compares the referendum, unfavorably, to the Good Friday Agreement.

In his view, voters across the U.K. were not properly educated about what leaving the EU would mean.

He explains, “The Good Friday Agreement went to referendum in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland.

Every household in the North got a 30-page booklet full of institutional detail, explaining what would happen if they endorsed the agreement.”

With the referendum on “UKexit,” voters were faced with many unknowns.

O’Leary lists some of the unanswered questions: “Would they leave the single market? Would they leave the customs union? Would they leave what are called the flanking policies, e.g. fishing? Would they continue to have police and intelligence cooperation? Would there be some special travel arrangements?”

A united Ireland hasn’t been

defined. If it comes to a vote, I hope

to contribute to clarifying the terms of any possible Irish reunification.

These answers matter for the continued success of the Good Friday Agreement, which is built on the cross-border cooperation that membership in the EU allows.

The third volume of the Treatise addresses UKexit. In its preface, O’Leary writes that UKexit has unintentionally set the stage for future referendums, ones that he hopes will be better designed and better understood by voters.

He predicts that there will be another vote on Scottish independence—the 2014 referendum resulted in 55.3 percent of voters choosing to remain part of the U.K. And then there are other possibilities, ones that before UKexit seemed unlikely: a vote for Northern Ireland to leave the U.K. and reunify with Ireland, and a subsequent matching vote in the Republic of Ireland to endorse reunification.

If there were a vote on reunification, it would need to be as carefully negotiated and communicated as the Good Friday Agreement.

“A united Ireland hasn’t been defined,” O’Leary says. “If it comes to a vote, I hope to contribute to clarifying the terms of any possible Irish reunification.”

Brendan O’Leary has lived more of his life outside of Ireland than in it. A citizen of the U.S., Ireland, and the EU, he has a visiting professorship at Queen’s University Belfast and what he calls a “social summer home” in Northern Ireland: the village of Cushendall, in Country Antrim. His

FALL/WINTER 2019

Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, on the grounds of his alma mater, St. MacNissi’s College, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland (now called St. Killian’s College).

brother and sister-in-law live there and it’s three miles from St. MacNissi’s College, Garron Tower, the boarding school where he met John McGarry years before their academic partnership began.

“It’s a beautiful village,” he says. “I try to get there every summer. Every morning, as long as there’s no clouds or rain, I see Scotland across the Sea of Moyle.”

A lot has changed since his high school days, and those changes are what make the possibility of a re-unified Ireland all the more interesting.

The Troubles have ended and the North has become a tourist destination, bolstered by the draw of natural attractions like Giant’s Causeway and cultural

sites like filming locations for Game of Thrones and the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic was built. The Republic has seen the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger economy, followed

by Dublin’s emergence as a tech hub—“in which computers and chemicals are more important than cows,” O’Leary comments. The social influence of the Catholic Church has loosened, with Ireland becoming the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote.

But challenges remain. “The Republic of Ireland is now a rich country, a land of immigration,” says O’Leary. “People want to go live there. It is a fabulous thing to see.” The North, on the other hand, is

still partly a land of emigration, particularly of the college-educated, echoing O’Leary’s own choice to learn and work elsewhere. The status of the Irish language is an illustrative example of the cultural and political gulf between the North and the Republic: In the Republic, Irish is the national language and English has full official status. Irish appears on all street signs and is taught to all school children.

In the North, the Good Friday Agreement requires “respect, understanding, and tolerance” of the Irish language, along with English and Ulster Scots, but that provision has not yet been translated into the substantial recognition of Irish. Legislation that would require bilingual signs or

the appointment of an Irish language commissioner has been met with political resistance. To imagine a Northern Ireland that is reunified with the Republic, one must first address all the policies that separate the two places.

“Changes are perhaps more visible to me than to someone who has lived through them all,” O’Leary says. “I haven’t added up all the time I’ve spent in Ireland, but I don’t think a single year has passed in my adult life where I haven’t spent some time there. I get to be in the places I regard as beautiful or poignant, and I’m able to transmit knowledge and learn in many places.

I’ve never felt exiled.”

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OMNIA

SUMMER OF

SCIENCE “O

riginal research has a big learning curve,” says Ann Vernon-Grey, Senior Associate Director for Undergraduate Research. “The Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM) allows students from across Penn to work closely with faculty after their first or second years. That way, if they like what they find, they have the rest of their college years to really dive in.”

Lark Yan, C’22 The Fine Structure and Function of the Human Olfactory System with Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor, Department of Psychology and Perelman School of Medicine

“We are looking to better understand and organize the human olfactory system via immunohistochemical techniques on human post-mortem and biopsy samples.

We image the tissue slides on a confocal microscope and analyze the digitized data, which hopefully will allow us to map out the distribution of olfactory receptors and neurons. This can lead to a better understanding of the circuitry of the human olfactory system, as well as any potential connections to various neurodegenerative diseases.”

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As early as the summer after their first year, students in the College of Arts & Sciences have the opportunity to work alongside faculty from across the University.

by Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Camille DiBenedetto

Since its inception in 2007, PURM has paired more than 1,000 undergraduates with faculty for summer research fellowships. There are opportunities across all Penn schools.

“Faculty are an anchor for students,” explains Vernon-Grey. “This type of research and collaboration with professors gives students a real sense of achievement.”

Seasoned researchers stand to benefit from PURM, too. “When a student who is new to the world of scholarship is enthusiastic and motivated, that energy is infectious,” Vernon-Grey says. “In students, faculty can see themselves and where they started. They like to pay it forward.”

We spoke with five students who spent their summers in labs across Penn. Here, they explain what they’ve been working on.

FALL/WINTER 2019

Elena Cruz-Adames, C’22 Neurobiology of Courtship Behavior in Songbirds

with Marc Schmidt, Professor of Biology

“I have been exposed to different aspects of the lab’s research involving electrophysiology and courtship behavior in songbirds.

My focus is brain histology and resulting microscopy, which is the study of the microscopic anatomy of biological tissues. My particular work will revolve around the neurobiology of female brown-headed cowbirds, specifically a neural circuit known as the song system and the role it plays in courtship.”

Marvin Morgan, C’21 Exploring the Milky Way’s Dynamics with Gaia

with Robyn Sanderson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy “This summer I’m working in Professor Sanderson’s lab. Down in DRL [David Rittenhouse Laboratory], I’m learning how to use stellar orbits to calculate how much dark matter is in our galaxy.

I import data from a space telescope called Gaia, and I use that data to show how much dark matter is distributed in the Milky Way and to prove that dark matter actually exists in our galaxy.”

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OMNIA

Hannah Erdogan, C’22 Uncovering a Novel Mechanism of Pediatric Neurodegeneration

with Elizabeth Bhoj, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine “In the lab now, the focus is on pediatric neurodegenerative disorders. We identify certain genes that cause phenotypical problems in the brain, such as different facial abnormalities or developmental delays. As an undergrad in a lab, I’m doing a lot of pipetting, mixing of solutions, measurements, and other basic things. You have to start somewhere and I’m learning a lot—that’s what matters most.”

James Lynch, C’21 Geometry, Design, and Dynamics of Deployable, Reconfigurable Structures

with Jordan Raney, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

“The fundamental properties of origami have been utilized in the development of spacecraft solar panels, the fabrication of foldable robots, and the improvement of medical devices.

Our project focuses on the properties of a novel design called rigid origami bellows, and we perform analyses by running simulations. This experience has introduced me to the world of engineering that lies at the intersection of art and science.”

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FALL/WINTER 2019

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 & Sciences research, including faculty, students, alumni, and events. Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

STUDENT SCIENTISTS (VIDEO) Seniors studying earth and environmental science conduct year-long investigations on topics from fish fossils to wildfires.

ORIGIN STORIES: RALPH ROSEN (VIDEO) Ralph M. Rosen, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, discusses his journey as a classics scholar.

INTERDISCIPLINARY PATH TO MEDICINE (VIDEO) For Rudmila Rashid, C’19, M’23, the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences is when the humanities and sciences come together.

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 & Sciences. In addition, the Penn Arts & Sciences Vimeo channel houses dozens of videos featuring faculty, students, and alumni.

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OMNIA

OMNIA 101

Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor of Music

LISTENING TO MUSIC Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor of Music, explains how listening is at once historical, social, personal, affective, and technical.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

For most of us, it can be difficult to understand what is going on at the cutting edge of scholarship.

OMNIA 101 offers readers a peek into what faculty do every day in their classrooms, and how they bring their expertise to the next generation.

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id you ever hear a song that was popular when you were younger, one you hadn’t heard in years? Maybe you were surprised by how quickly and effortlessly the lyrics come rushing back. Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor of Music, says that such a modern, personal relationship with music can be traced, roughly, back to Beethoven, whose compositions and approach to the circulation of music caused a radical shift in the way music was experienced, even if audiences at the time couldn’t explain it.

“We don’t necessarily have to know that the crooner is possible because microphone techniques were developed that allowed for

that sort of whispery intimate voice to be recorded,” he says. “We just hear that somebody’s speaking to us.”

In this installation of OMNIA 101, Moreno, a Grammy-nominated bassist, considers what we mean when we say we listen to music, and how that meaning changes depending on time, place, and cultural expectations. The author of a major study of the history of listening in early modern and modern music and a professor of introductory and advanced music theory, his musical appreciation runs the gamut from Mozart (“incredibly complex”) to Dolly Parton (“a musician’s musician”) and Missy Elliot (“ahead of her time”).

OMNIA 101

FALL/WINTER 2019

What is the difference between hearing and listening?

How has technology shaped how we listen?

Hearing describes the sense of perceiving sound, whilst listening entails some sort of intention. Even if you’re not “paying attention,” with listening there is a possibility you will be called upon by the sound.

In recent decades, there has been lot of theorizing that says that listening is always a relationship between things. There is sound—and sometimes that sound is music—but then there is something else that listens.

Only analytically, and not practically, can we pull them apart.

Beethoven was a composer who obsessed over trying to fix every aspect of musical notation. Obsessed, and failed, in a way. He spent much of his life adding words on top of the music, trying to tell the performers how to play here, how to play there, doing the best he could within the constraints of his notation system.

Then we entered the phonographic era, and instead of notes written on a page, music could be circulated aurally.

Are there standard listening practices?

Different cultures and expectations have developed around listening.

The contemporary concert hall, for instance, inherits from the 19th century certain attitudes about what it is to listen. Among other things, those attitudes require silence from the listeners. It involves a particular form of submission, willful and productive, but none the less, a submission.

Then there is the more contemporary example of a DJ performing for a massive group of dancers. Is the DJ “playing?” Are the dancers “listening?” In a way, yeah. The dancers are listening in that they are attuned to something, and the listening becomes dispersed through bodily activity. Though they are part of a group, each dancer experiences the sound through individual consciousness and embodied experience.

And dancers and listeners enter in a feedback loop with the DJ, who in a way, listens back and calibrates her tracks in response. Listening straddles the collective-individual assemblage even as it can encourage sharp distinctions within it or blur them altogether.

Let’s imagine I am a ten-year-old using music editing software like Garage Band or Logic: I could create and combine sounds, and learn how to deal with them, really early on in life. That sort of making, that composing, that putting together—it was not possible when you inscribed music via notation. These are not radical shifts in themselves, rather they represent recalibrations of the interfaces by which music is registered. Listening, though it too changes, remains a constant.

Can you teach people to be “good” listeners?

I have children, so I know, anecdotally at least, that young people listen a lot, and they’re very judgmental about what they like and what they hate. Sometimes it’s just a simple reaction: “Oh that’s the music of my parents,” or, “Dad, this is weird.”

One thing you can do is try to have them articulate what they like or don’t like about a song. Often, that’s rhythm or beat. We have a species-given capacity to attune to cyclic repetitions of some kind— it’s just part of who we are.

If you start there, you can move to things that may be less obvious.

Is a song repetitive? Does it have

a melody? We have genres of music for which melody is not valued and others for which it is central. A good pop tune—it could be the Jonas Brothers, Ariana Grande, or Ed Sheeran—will tend to have a melodic line. In rap, you can focus on the delivery of words in a complex and creative way, very different than what a pop song is trying to do.

There’s a lot of comparative work that can be done by listeners. Why and how does Billie Eilish sound different than Miley Cyrus? That’s a debate between my daughters.

They can see, in different modes of musical organization, something significant, and relevant to their interests as listeners.

Does musical knowledge make for a better listening experience?

There is an argument that goes something like, “Well, you’re robbing the mystery of the music, because now I understand the powers by which it moves me!” But the reality is that when you press play, music’s powers do not wane by the fact that you can now name the chorus and the verse.

With knowledge, I hope there is a sense of discovery, an excited, “Oh! Listen to that part!”

What music do you like listening to?

I love jazz, and jazz as a modern aesthetic phenomenon values complexity and virtuosity, while there are other types of music for which that is not important. But as a music theorist, I’m always listening to different kinds of music. I’m amazed by the many ways in which we, as a musical species, are able to shape sound. It never ceases to amaze me that there’s always something, anywhere in the world, anywhere in time, that is just so marvelously creative and impactful.

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OMNIA

FACULTY OPINION

THE ENTHUSIAST

By Errol Lord Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of Philosophy

Illustration by Mariya Pilipenko

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FALL/WINTER 2019

The virtue of the enthusiast is not well understood. For one, it takes a lot more to be an enthusiast than to have enthusiasm. The enthusiast has enthusiasm, but there is more to it. The enthusiast draws their attention to what is actually worth paying attention to; the enthusiast gets things right. Bourdain wasn’t indiscriminate in his enthusiasm. As Linda Holmes put it, his enthusiasm was “best understood not as bland and undiscerning rahrah pump of the fist, but as undiluted appetite.” As he often put it, he was after the good stuff.

Having a sensitivity to the good stuff is one important aspect of the enthusiast.

Yet there is still more to it. Snobs are also sensitive to value. But snobbery is anathema to the enthusiast. The difference lies in the fact that the snob thinks they have a monopoly on good taste. They think that what they like is all that is truly likeable. This is often, although not necessarily, coupled with the belief that what they like is part of high culture and thus superior to other valuable things (snobbery can be found everywhere, though; snobbery runs the gamut from music to pilsners to professional soccer leagues). They are thus not open to the vast array of the good and the interesting. Over time this leads to a dulling of their sensitivity to what’s good.

The enthusiast, on the other hand, is open to new values. They go forth into the day expecting to be dazzled by some unknown wonder. They realize that the world is filled with a plurality of value that no one has a monopoly over.

Bourdain had this in spades. His life as a

celebrity was dedicated to finding what was good across the globe. What made his shows particularly great was the fact that by tapping into his openness to the world, we all learned more about the unique values at the heart of the places he sought out.

Bourdain often palled around with locals in order to get an inside track.

Often these guests would fall into another nearby category worth contrasting with the enthusiast. This is the aficionado. The aficionado is, perhaps by necessity, an enthusiast. But one can be an enthusiast without being an aficionado. What marks the difference is that the aficionado is an expert. They have a specialist knowledge about the area which they are enthused about.

Eric Sucar

early all who paid tribute to the great chef, writer, and traveler Anthony Bourdain fondly noted that he was a self-described enthusiast.

It was difficult not to, because that description was so apt. Bourdain was a paradigm enthusiast. It was this quality that was at the heart of his infectious virtue.

FACULTY OPINION

Errol Lord is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of Philosophy. He is a 2019–2020 Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center.

Bourdain was certainly an aficionado about many things he explored on his shows—French cooking, sushi, hot dogs, to name a few. He was great fun when it came to these things. But his shows’ most profound moments came when he was discovering new wonders. This often required bravery in the face of the unknown. It was in these moments when his enthusiasm was at its purest, when his passion to get the good stuff pushed him through fear, loneliness, or alienation.

The beginning of the fall term is always exciting. What lies ahead is a sustained period of discovery. The university is a uniquely special place for the enthusiast, whether you’re part of the alumni community, or here on campus.

Let me offer some free advice to all of you, advice that seems to me all the more vital in our ominous current condition. Revel in the vast interestingness of the world. But don’t forget that there is always more to unearth and that you haven’t sussed it all out. Be brave in the face of what’s unknown. More often than not, the world will deliver something wonderful.

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OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

With guidance from Meghan Crnic, Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Research Coordinator in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, Jung tackled archival research for the first time, digging into CCWA’s extensively documented history.

OUTDOOR RESEARCH Lara Jung, C’19, explores the history of nature as medicine.

As an outdoors enthusiast, health and societies major Lara Jung, C’19, became intrigued by the concept of “nature prescription programs,” in which healthcare providers prescribe outdoor activities to improve patient health.

Her thesis paper, “Reimagining the Country: A Landscape of Children’s Health and Wellbeing from 1875–1975,” tracked CCWA’s shifting priorities through time, from an initial emphasis on children’s physical health to spiritual well-being in the early 20th century to civic cohesion during World War II to child development theory in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, as well as the group’s evolving approaches to racial integration.

Courtesy of Lara Jung

“This organization had created for themselves an idea of what the countryside could do,” says Jung. “It was the idea that its program could help children address the issues of the city. But it had to be in a place that was natural and almost uniquely American—I mean this is a Jeffersonian idea, that the countryside is a utopian place.”

She notes that recent studies highlight the value of nature for mental health, with evidence that being outdoors alleviates anxiety by retraining the adrenaline response to stress and reducing cortisol levels.

“I personally really believe in the value of spending time outdoors,” Jung says, “and I think encouraging children and families to do the same is only going to mean good things for our public health.” — JANE CARROLL

TRANSFORMATIONAL MOMENTS The Penn Arts & Sciences Pathways video series highlights the intellectual journeys of undergraduates.

Lara Jung, C’19

“I’ve always been hiking and camping with my family, and I knew intuitively that being out in nature made me feel better,” she says.

Karen Kim, C’21, grew up in a Korean home in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Though she had originally thought she would follow a pre-med track, classes with Heather Williams, Presidential Term Professor of Africana Studies, and Grace Sanders Johnson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, influenced her decision to become an Africana Studies major.

Kim is one of the several undergraduates featured in Pathways, a new Penn Arts & Sciences video series that interviews students about their College journeys. Some students had a path in mind before they ever set foot on

In the Temple University Urban Archives, she learned about the Children’s Country Week Association (CCWA), an organization founded in 1875 to bring city children to the countryside.

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Camille DiBenedetto

During her senior year, Jung completed an internship with NaturePHL, a local organization of physicians, public health educators, and park officials that connects Philadelphia families with activities in parks, trails, and green spaces to promote well-being.

Her initial idea for her senior thesis was to interview pediatricians and families who were giving and receiving nature prescriptions, but as the project evolved, she decided to take a historical approach.

“As a student in health and societies, I thought about the roots of this movement,” she says.

Alyssa Cavazos, C’22

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campus, while others were inspired by classes or faculty to chart a different course than initially planned.

“I think it’s more about not keeping your mind closed to what’s out there, and what you’re passionate about doesn’t have to fit into other people’s agendas,” says Erdogan.

Ana Przybylowski, C’19, received scholarships in business and planned to pursue a career in sports management.

After taking an oceanography class, however, she developed a passion for earth and environmental science. During her senior year, she took a Master of Environmental Studies (MES) class with Sally Willig, Lecturer and Advisor in the MES program, and worked as a volunteer intern at the Philadelphia Zoo. “You can do anything with an earth and environmental science degree,” says Przybylowski. “Any kind of industry is going to have an environmental scientist because every industry has an impact on the environment.”

Sometimes, academic journeys begin early. Marvin Morgan, C’21, became interested in astrophysics as a child after visiting the Kennedy Space Station, where his uncle worked as a NASA engineer. Fourteen years later, he’s assisting Robyn Sanderson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, by importing and analyzing data from the Gaia mission to understand how much dark matter is distributed in the Milky Way. “In astrophysics, there’s always something new just because of the vast size of the universe and how much we don’t know. There’s always room to learn something new or find something out that has never been discovered before,” says Morgan.

“I think that’s really important with Penn—it’s really fast paced, but you can also find something you enjoy, stay there, figure it out because you have people that are encouraging and motivating you as well as working with you or sometimes even challenging you,” Cavazos says. “And those challenges really motivate you to keep doing what you’re doing if you’re very passionate about it.” — CAMILLE DIBENEDETTO

CAN BINGE-WATCHING CHANGE OUR OPINIONS? Nicholas Berrettini, LPS’19, examines Italian crime dramas.

When Nicholas Berrettini wanted to watch The Sopranos as a teenager, his father said no. “My dad was offended by it. He felt it perpetuated stereotypes toward American Italians,” he says.

Now Berrettini, who just graduated with a degree in Italian studies from the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, wants to see how media can influence our opinions—especially in an age of streaming and binge-watching.

After catching up on The Sopranos in college, he had gone on to watch The Wire, and then Gomorra and Romanzo Criminale, two Italian polizieschi, or crime dramas. He was seeing common threads, some expected, but some which surprised him.

“They were all set in a homosocial, super-masculine crime environment,” says Berrettini. “The characters all dress really well, and there always seems to be

one gay character just inserted in, who is illustrated as lesser in some sort of way.”

Courtesy of the Office of the Dean

Hannah Erdogan, C’22, always thought she would major in biology on the pre-med track. But after working with refugees in high school and with Penn Undergraduates for Refugee Empowerment (PURE), she decided to major in psychology and minor in Middle Eastern studies, with the goal of becoming a bilingual or multilingual physician.

For Alyssa Cavazos, C’22, growing up with the Everglades as her backyard meant she was always fascinated by the world around her. She came to Penn knowing that she wanted to study biochemistry, but her work with Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor of Energy Research, and her mentor, Sophie Rubashkin, a graduate fellow in the Goldberg lab, opened her eyes to conceptual chemistry and working in a lab.

Nicholas Berrettini, LPS’19

Berrettini wrote his senior honors thesis on conceptualization of Italian masculinity in polizieschi, finding an arc of ideas on masculine Italian identity from fascism to Berlusconism, and discussing the effect of the “hypermasculinity” depicted in the shows.

“It’s definitely a conservative, male identity in that men are expected to fulfill particular social rules. However, there’s also a lot of attention placed on how a man looks,” says Berrettini, whose thesis, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Leather Jackets,” received the award of excellence in Italian studies.

He traces the idea of uniform dress back to fascism in Italy. “It’s extremely rigid,” he says. “I used this for context because these are similar very rigid environments in crime. Fascism itself was a successful organized crime organization.”

Berrettini believes there should be empirical studies to determine if media can negatively affect prejudices, with interdisciplinary work done among the humanities, arts, and sciences.

“We have so many more tools now and such a great scientific understanding,” he says. “I think any kind of art should not be censored, but we do need to understand better what’s happening to people who are watching.”

— SUSAN AHLBORN 51

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

STUDYING ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL ARTIFACTS IN GREECE Zahra Elhanbaly, C’21, explores the mystery of large artifacts found at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. A summer internship took Zahra Elhanbaly, C’21, to the Greek island of Paros for two weeks, where she was tasked with creating detailed architectural drawings for her professor’s research into massive marble artifacts.

Prior to the internship, Elhanbaly, an architecture major and art history minor, took a course with Mantha Zarmakoupi, Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture, last year.

“I’ve always been interested in conservation and architectural restoration, preserving older buildings, and reconstructing them,” Elhanbaly says.

In Greece, the two worked together in a storeroom that holds hundreds of objects, including carved marble capitals dating to the 5th century BCE, excavated from a Paros harbor. At about 2 meters square, they are on the scale of those topping columns at the Parthenon, and date to the same period—but their history is unknown.

The pair will work on the project throughout the school year to prepare for Zarmakoupi to return to Paros next summer. She is also putting together a volume of essays that will include Elhanbaly’s work.

In the spring, Elhanbaly will spend a semester abroad in London at an architecture school. “Seeing architecture around the world, seeing other parts of the world, is an inspiration,” she says. “I want to think about how I might use this in the future.”

— LOUISA SHEPARD

BLACK BOYS, GRIEF, AND GUNS IN URBAN SCHOOLS Nora Gross, joint doctoral candidate in sociology and education, examines how students grieve and recover after gun violence kills peers.

Courtesy of Zahra Elhanbaly

In 2008, Nora Gross was running a student writing center within a Chicago high school when a drowning accident claimed the lives of three public school students.

“It was not just an unimaginable loss to their families, but a profound loss to the school and their friends, some of whom did not easily recover,” says Gross, whose experience of processing grief with her students led her to earn a master’s degree in the sociology of education.

With time, her interest in the student grieving process in high-poverty, urban areas increased, particularly in relation to gun violence.

“I wanted to understand how the particular kind of emotional experience or trauma of losing multiple friends to gun violence affects urban students’ experience with school and their ideas about their own futures,” says Gross, now a joint doctoral candidate in sociology and education.

On her first visit to Greece, and her first time traveling alone, Zahra Elhanbaly, C’21, visited the Acropolis in Athens.

“Part of the experience was talking to professors about their theories on this piece. Was it a monument that was destroyed, or planned and never built?

Or had they made a piece and decided not to use it?” Elhanbaly says.

“We were looking really closely at all the markings asking, ‘What could have happened?’”

Her drawings document each mark, all clues to the capitals’ past and purpose.

Original tool carvings, damage from recent moving, corrosion from seawater, fossilized shells—she chronicled it all in hand-drawn sketches, sophisticated architectural elevations, and a series of photographs.

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As a doctoral student, Gross did ethnographic research for two years in an all-boys public charter high school in a high-poverty area of Philadelphia.

The summer prior to her arrival, the school lost a student to gun violence. In her second year on site, the school community lost two more young men in separate incidents.

Gross, who received the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, examines how the school’s surviving students dealt with the deaths of their peers and how the adults in the building supported (or sometimes failed to support) them, while giving voice to the grief and trauma of Black male students.

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Eric Sucar

When asked what she hopes readers will take away from her work, Gross says, “We all need to better understand and appreciate the full complexity of Black boys’ emotional lives because it’s necessary to understand how they grieve in order to support them.”

In addition to her research on gun violence and grieving, Gross collaborated with John L. Jackson, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology, on a documentary that describes life through the eyes of Southern African American gay men. The film, Making Sweet Tea, was co-directed and co-produced by Jackson and Gross and includes a score

by Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music.

It premiered in September.

— KATELYN SILVA

RESEARCHERS THINK SMALL TO MAKE PROGRESS TOWARD BETTER FUEL CELLS Jennifer Lee, chemistry graduate student, shows how custom-designed nanomaterials can make fuel cells more efficient.

Fuel cells, which convert chemical energy into electrical power, may be a solution for renewable energy storage.

But before fuel cells can be widely used, chemists and engineers need to find ways to make this technology more costeffective and stable for long-term use.

A new publication, led by chemistry graduate student Jennifer Lee, shows how custom-designed nanomaterials can be used to address these challenges.

Published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the research demonstrates how a fuel cell can be built from cheaper, more widely available metals using an atomic-level design that also gives the material long-term stability.

The reaction that powers fuel cells relies on the movement of ions between a negative anode and a positive cathode.

Graduate student Jennifer Lee uses a large transmission electron microscope, housed in the Singh Center, to take a closer look at the nanomaterials and nanocrystals that are synthesized in the lab.

In the study, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Fuel Cell Technology Office, Lee focused on creating a new material for the cathode of a specific type of fuel cell. “The cathode is more of a problem, because the materials are either platinum or platinum-based, which are expensive and have slower reaction rates,” she says. “Designing the catalyst for the cathode is the main focus of designing a good fuel cell.”

Fuel cell catalysts are typically made of precious metals such as platinum, and Lee’s approach for making a more efficient and cost-effective catalyst was to design a material that had platinum at the surface, where the chemical reaction occurs, while using more common metals, such as cobalt, in the bulk to provide stability and structure. By

controlling exactly where each atom sat in the catalyst and locking the structure in place, the cathode catalyst was able to work for longer periods than when the atoms were arranged randomly.

Through this work, Lee also learned firsthand how chemistry research directly connects to real-world challenges.

She presented her findings at the International Precious Metals Institute conference and says that meeting members of the precious-metals community was enlightening. “There are companies looking at fuel-cell technology and talking about the newest design of the fuel-cell cars,” she says. “You get to interact with people that think of your project from different perspectives.”

— ERICA K. BROCKMEIER

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IN THE CLASSROOM

MY VIPER SUMMER Students and professors in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research spent the summer in the lab.

By Susan Ahlborn

Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

still want to know what your middle school science projects were,” says Karen Goldberg, Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, to Bernie Wang.

“The first year I was shooting lasers through Jell-O, pretty much,” answers Wang, C’21, E’21. “The next year, I found a biofuel project where you soaked chunks of cotton rope in oils.”

You don’t often get to hear an undergraduate chat about his seventh-grade science project with an internationally known researcher, but Wang has been collaborating with Goldberg, who is also Vagelos Professor in Energy Research in the Department of Chemistry, for almost two years. This mentorship is just one part of how the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) gives its students graduate-level experience by the time they earn their undergraduate degree.

VIPER is a small and select cohort of students committed to solving the energy problems the world faces. They all complete two majors, one in Penn Arts & Sciences and one in Penn Engineering, so they can look at problems from both a scientific and a technological perspective.

And they all spend the summer after their first year in a professor’s lab, beginning their research related to energy resilience.

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Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research in the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, and Bernie Wang, C’21, E’21

“The idea is that they engage with stateof-the-art research as soon as possible,” says Andrew M. Rappe, Blanchard Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and VIPER Faculty Co-Director.

John Vohs, Carl V.S. Patterson Professor of Chemical Engineering and the other Co-Director of VIPER, also notes that, “This early research experience allows them to become integral members of a research group while still an undergraduate. Many VIPER students have published

papers on their research in prominent scientific journals by the time they graduate.”

Wang, for example, was an author on an article published this fall.

The students continue to do lab research throughout their undergraduate careers, learning how to deal with the challenges of investigation and to write and present scientific information for different audiences. In Goldberg’s lab, Wang is helping to design a multi-catalyst system to convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen to methanol. Using three catalysts instead

IN THE CLASSROOM

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of just one allows them to optimize each step individually, improving the overall yield.

Both Kate Jiang, C’22, E’22, and Luka Yancopoulos, C’21, E’21, are conducting research at the subatomic level. Jiang is working with Christopher Murray, Richard Perry University Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering, to use atoms and molecules to build new types of materials that can convert light to other types of energy. In the lab of Marija Drndić, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, Yancopoulos is fabricating nanopores, tiny holes which can measure DNA or other materials. It’s very fundamental research, but membranes with these pores could be used for energy storage or water filtration.

With Deep Jariwala, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Natalia Acero, C’21, E’21, is exploring how thin photovoltaic-like structures can be, down to just five or 10 atoms. A possible use: solar cells to power devices where weight is important, like in outer space.

Often, one of the first things students learn in the lab is what can go wrong. Acero says, “At the beginning you’re very surprised at how common it is for things to actually not work out, or that you’re working on something for months and suddenly think, ‘You need to drop this.’

But it’s also a huge motivator.”

(Top to bottom) Natalia Acero, C’21, E’21, and Deep Jariwala, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering; Luka Yancopoulos, C’21, E’21, and Marija Drndić, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics; Kate Jiang, C’22, E’22, and Christopher Murray, Richard Perry University Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering

“There may be some interaction that is unpredicted, but you discover you can use it for your benefit or you get an idea how to turn it into a useful thing,” says Drndić. “Everything is science, basically, even a negative.”

Throughout the summer, the VIPER students meet weekly for lunch. “We have students from all

different major combinations, from physics and chemical engineering to earth science and bioengineering, and all kinds of researchers,” says Jiang. “It’s just great. By listening to their presentations and asking them questions, I get to know more than just what I’m working on.”

I’ve absolutely gained the confidence of knowing I can be given a new topic and I can understand it because of my mentors in the lab.

The bond the students form with their professors, lab mates, and classmates may be as big an advantage as the technical knowledge they acquire. “I’ve absolutely gained the confidence of knowing I can be given a new topic and I can understand it because of my mentors in the lab,” says Yancopoulos, who is conducting his own research project.

The professors welcome the undergraduates’ fresh outlooks. “VIPER undergraduates have unique perspectives because they are looking at the basic science side as well as the applied side, and they ask questions that get you thinking in a new direction,” says Engineering’s Jariwala.

By the end of the summer, says VIPER Co-Director Rappe, the students will have new questions that will drive them to get further knowledge in the classroom, and that fuels their interest to return to the lab.

Perry University Professor Murray adds, “By the time students have spent a couple of summers on a project they really are operating on the level of our graduate population.

And then it’s just a joy.”

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MOVERS & QUAKERS

Neil Tuch, C’88, PAR’21

BACK TO SCHOOL Neil Tuch, C’88, PAR’21, isn’t surprised about where he ended up, but he couldn’t have predicted how he’d get there.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

uck comes up often when talking to Neil Tuch, C’88, PAR’21. Looking back at a career that took him from Wall Street to working at an independent school, with detours to a New York City volunteer network and West Coast private equity firms, he recognizes where he’s had good fortune and where things didn’t turn out as planned.

One serendipitous event was meeting his wife, Adrienne Polishook Tuch, C’89, PAR’21 at a mutual Penn friend’s wedding.

Adrienne’s path was less varied than Neil’s, but was also shaped by the flexibility of a liberal arts education: she majored in history, 56

going on to medical school and a career as a pediatrician.

Their oldest of three daughters, Bayley Tuch, C’21, studies political science, computer science, and data analytics in the College.

Neil learned about Charles Armstrong School, where he is the Chief Financial Officer, through his youngest daughter.

“Armstrong educates students with dyslexia and related learning differences,” Neil says. “Students come here because they’ve had challenges in their previous schools, and parents are determined to find a school whose teaching methods will work for their children. Armstrong is that place.”

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Q: What are your standout memories from your days as a Penn student?

From the first day I stepped foot in the Baby Quad, I loved my time at Penn. Lifelong friends, SCUE, Parliamentary Debate, an outrageous Senior Week—all provided humorous moments and lasting memories.

At the risk of sounding more academic than I really am, what stands out now is how many classes with stellar professors I packed into my College experience. Ethics and the Professions, with Provost Thomas Ehrlich, provided me great frameworks to think through challenging workplace issues. I also think about Heroes and Society, taught by the legendary Jack Reece. The class was fascinating but, truthfully, I struggled to keep up with the reading. When Dr. Reece passed away in 1997, I remember people talking about what an amazing teacher he had been and regretting I had not made the most out of that class.

Q: Your career path has had many twists and turns. Did that surprise you?

I think we all expect to have some changes in our career but I’m not sure I would have ever predicted moving from financial jobs to not-for-profit positions not just once, but twice in my career. I like to think that each step along the way, no matter how different from the step before, brought some set of experiences that shaped the next step. Goldman Sachs taught me skills I brought to New York Cares and I know the empathy I built working with underserved populations at New York Cares shaped my later work.

Anyone’s career can take these unexpected turns. Whatever you choose right after college, you can

choose something different next, and after that and after that. It’s important to know it doesn’t have to be a straight line.”

Q: What did you like about working in private equity?

My entry into private equity really came about through luck…actually bad luck. I worked at an early stage medical device company—it was fascinating but our device didn’t work and funding was running low.

When it was clear that the product redesign would take years, I helped raise more money and left for private equity.

I loved starting H.I.G. Capital’s San Francisco office, playing a part in hiring every person and truly shaping the office culture. I also enjoyed the sales aspect of being a partner: selling management teams on how we could make their company even more successful by finding a story, shared interest, or vision they connected with.

But look—I’ll never claim to have been a great investor. I learned a hard but important lesson: You can try to do all the right things, but investments don’t always work out the way you planned. You have to take responsibility for your decisions, and sometimes you’re not going to be in the right place at the right time.

Q: How did you get involved with Charles Armstrong School?

After 16 years in private equity, I semi-retired and was trying to figure out my next step. I was able to spend more time with Adrienne and my three daughters and do a lot of volunteer work, which was an incredible luxury. One of the places I volunteered was Charles Armstrong, where my youngest

daughter had been a student since second grade. I was a member of Armstrong’s Finance Committee and knew they were looking for a CFO. I ignored their need for a while and enjoyed my free time with ESPN and hiking with my dog. Eventually my interest in the school’s mission got the best of me and I casually asked a board member if I should think about the position; within two weeks I was in an office, getting to work.

Q: What is it like to work at a school?

Hopefully it doesn’t sound clichéd, but I feel very lucky to be part of the team leading Armstrong. The work is mission-driven—every decision is focused on how to create the best learning environment for dyslexic students. I oversee the school’s business side. Some people assume the not-for-profit world is easier than the business world, but I promise you that schools, with their multiple stakeholders, are much more complicated than people imagine. Students, parents, teachers, staff, neighbors … every day my people skills and analytical skills are put to the test. My proudest moments are leading our financial aid program and opening up educational opportunities to families who didn’t think they would be available.

Even on my toughest days, I can leave stop in and see what the second-graders are learning.

Few work breaks are as much fun as that!

People say kind things to me about devoting this stage of my career to a school. But, we all know the real heroes are the graduates who become teachers right out of school and devote their entire careers to making an impact on students’ lives.

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

Ben Asen

AMBASSADOR COUNCIL The Penn Arts & Sciences Ambassador Council was recently established to create value for students and alumni across the globe through volunteer involvement, intellectual engagement, and philanthropy. The Ambassador Council engages with Penn Arts & Sciences alumni through events and online content, career networking, and mentoring for current students and recent graduates of the College.

At an inaugural event, the Ambassador Council presented Career Conversations, hosted by Alex Bellos, C’06, a Council member and President of West Elm, at the company’s headquarters in Brooklyn. The evening featured Bellos and Laura Alber, C’90, PAR’20, PAR’23, CEO of Williams-Sonoma, who shared career insights and strategies for success and provided an opportunity for alumni and students to connect with mentors.

(L–R) Julia Ford-Carther; Fong Wa Chung, C’05; Alex Bellos, C’06; Amber Payne, C’11; Mariama Perry, C’11; and Fatu Siede Coleman, C’11, at the Ambassador Council Career Conversations event in Brooklyn.

Ben Asen

PROFESSIONAL WOMEN’S ALLIANCE The Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) hosts an annual summer networking event for students and alumnae of Penn Arts & Sciences, to provide them with opportunity to network with PWA members and ask for career advice. Jillian Karande, C’18, attended last summer’s event at BuzzFeed’s headquarters, where she connected with the event’s hosts, Suzie Cohen, C’04, and Rebecca Scott, C’06, and learned more about BuzzFeed and career opportunities within the company. That contact and subsequent follow-up led to Karande receiving a full-time position with BuzzFeed. This connection is one of many made at PWA events and illustrates the power of Penn networking.

(L–R) Rebecca Scott, C’06; Jillian Karande, C’18; and Jamie Handwerker, C’83, PAR’19, and PWA President, at the Summer Networking Reception at BuzzFeed.

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The PWA connects professionally accomplished alumnae with students and young alumnae of the College, through professional development and career networking opportunities.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/PWA.

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

PENN ARTS & SCIENCES AT WORK Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog which tells stories of the extended Penn Arts & Sciences community. The diverse paths of Penn Arts & Sciences alumni are captured through images and personal vignettes focusing on their daily work lives.

TO SEE MORE, VISIT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/AT-WORK. Brooke Sietinsons

“The biggest challenge when you’re starting out in a career is learning to listen more effectively to other people and to be more responsive.”

- REBECCA AABERG, C’10 Inclusion Specialist at The International Foundation for Electoral Systems Washington, D.C. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MAJOR

Alex Schein

“I think hands down, the most meaningful experience for me so far was being able to unify children with their mothers after being separated at the border.

That was profoundly emotional for me.”

-IVÁN ESPINOZAMADRIGAL, C’01 Executive Director of the Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston, Massachusetts POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO STUDIES MAJORS

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WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MICHAEL WEISBERG? The Professor and Chair of Philosophy has made recent stops on every continent.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Illustration by Josie Portillo • Photography by Michael Weisberg The Galápagos Islands are Weisberg’s most frequent destination. He visited in May 2018, September 2018, January 2019, and again in July 2019, each time for research funded through the School’s Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants. He is a leader of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance (GERA), a partnership between Penn faculty and the people of the Galápagos, particularly the community on San Cristóbal Island.

GERA projects address issues where ecology, climate change, poverty, and educational inequality intersect. The longest-running GERA project focuses on protecting endangered sea lions, promoting positive attitudes toward conservation, and encouraging philosophical questions about science.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Weisberg is working on a documentary about the search for dark matter. The observatory, located in the Southern Atacama Desert, is the principle observation site of the Carnegie Institute of Science thanks to the location’s altitude and lack of light pollution. It’s home to five high-powered telescopes. He visited the site in summer 2018.

Cheers! In July 2018, Weisberg touched down in London, England, to visit with former students.

After his pit stop in England, it was on to Botswana, where Weisberg was the faculty host for a Penn Alumni trip.

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Highlights of the trip included the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage paleoanthropological site, and Moremi Game Reserve, home to species including lion, elephant, buffalo, giraffe, hyena, zebra, kudu, lechwe, tsessebe, and antelope. As a scholar of social attitudes toward scientific issues including climate change and conservation, Weisberg was on hand to complement the scenery with lectures and offer food for thought.

In August 2018 and 2019, Weisberg took a trip down under to attend the Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach workshops in New South Wales, Australia.

In October 2018, Weisberg visited East China Normal University in Shanghai, China to give a lecture on community science in the Galápagos.

In early 2019, Weisberg journeyed to Antarctica on another Penn Alumni trip. Weisberg and a group of intrepid alums sailed from Argentina, crossing the legendary Drake Passage and viewing natural wonders including icebergs, volcanic craters, and a colony of penguins.

Weisberg has made two recent trips to Israel. The first, in 2018, was to attend a conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The freshest stamp in his passport is from September 2019, when he traveled north of Haifa to investigate the potential for community science partnerships like the ones he works on in the Galápagos.

(L–R) Antarctica, the Galápagos Islands, Botswana, Antarctica, the Galápagos Islands

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EXCERPTS FROM LADYSITTING Lorene Cary’s memoir reflects on the responsibility and privileges of caregiving.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Courtesy of Lorene Cary

n Lorene Cary’s latest memoir, her grandmother’s illness motivates her to reflect on her family’s history, shaped through migration, marriage, death, birth, and illness, as well as the national legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Cary, C’78, G’78, and a lecturer in English, published Ladysitting in 2019.

The memoir begins when Cary’s grandmother, Lorene Cary Jackson, can no longer live on her own. Cary opens her home and becomes a caregiver. In this excerpt, she remembers childhood weekends at her grandparents’ house in New Jersey, a place she considered a respite from her own home in West Philadelphia. This passage reveals Cary’s lifelong interest in gathering family stories and the challenging nature of memory. ··· On our leisurely weekends, I asked Nana questions to try to elicit her stories in long form. What she gave, what my father later gave, her nubs, thumbnails, beats. Example: “My only memory of my mother was her sending me into the field to pick cotton to stuff a doll she was making for me.”

The family came north the year Nana turned six. Soft cotton bursts the boll in the fall, but sharp spurs on the tips 62

(L–R) Jack Cary, John Cary (the author’s father), and Lorene Cary Jackson

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Courtesy of Lorene Cary

stick the fingers of even experienced pickers.

Other hazards: cockle burrs in the rows stick to clothing; saw briars cut the legs and feet; various insects, including the notorious pack saddle, bite and sting. Would Nana’s mother, Lizzie E. Burnet, wife of a landowner, even if she were busy with other children, have sent six- or five- or four-year old Nana into a field to harvest even a few tiny handfuls of cotton alone? Did Lizzie grow ornamental cotton near the house just for this purpose, as our own neighbors did in Pennsylvania. (“Every child oughta know cotton! ” said Aunt Bea from Georgia, wife of Uncle Fletcher, who believed that pure tobacco never hurt anybody, but that “devilish filters” were causing lung cancer.)

But, back to Lizzie: suppose she grew just enough cotton to make dolls, like we grow herbs in pots by our back doors in the city.

Would she have sent a young child out to get her fingers pricked, and, as one of my granddaughters says, “cry-cry-cry”?

Once I had my own daughters, and once I had studied cotton enough to write books about the South, these were my new questions. But throughout my childhood, Nana repeated the same story, almost word for word. ···

Lizzie E. Burnett Hagans, Lorene Cary Jackson’s mother; William Scarlett Hagans, Lorene Cary Jackson’s father, in Goldsboro, North Carolina; Lorene Cary with her mother and sister on her grandmother’s porch

Eric Sucar

Lorene Cary, C’78, G’78, has been a lecturer in the Department of English since 1995. She is the founder of Safe Kids Stories, an online collection of stories and multimedia, and Art Sanctuary, a community organization that uses Black arts to enrich the Philadelphia region. Her first book, Black Ice, is a memoir of her experience as a Black student at a prestigious New England boarding school. Her novels, The Price of a Child and If Sons, Then Heirs, tell stories of the historical and contemporary effects of slavery in the U.S. Cary wrote the script for The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, a multimedia exhibit at Independence National Historical Park.

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Josh Pontrelli

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OMNIA

LAST LOOK

FALL/WINTER 2019

Students in Alain Plante’s Global Seminar, Case Studies in Environmental Sustainability, stand beneath the Seljalandsfoss waterfall on the southern coast of Iceland in May 2019.

The waterfall is part of a river that originates from a glacier atop EyjafjallajĂśkull, the volcano that disrupted travel across Europe in 2010. Plante, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, chose Iceland as the course topic and destination because its rugged landscape, reputation as a renewable energy hub, and high levels of tourism allowed students to research topics ranging from climate change and energy production to land management and fisheries.

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POWERS us MAKE YOUR GIFT ONLINE: WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/ANNUAL-FUND FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact Robbie Brennan Hain, C’79, GEd’79, at mhain@sas.upenn.edu or 215-746-8208.