Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2023

clues clues e in the Chemistry Chemistry

Atmospheric chemist Joseph Francisco looks to the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and different planets for insight, always with Earth in mind. PAGE 18

The Other 90 Percent

By Jane Carroll

COVER STORY: The Clues in the Chemistry

Childhood curiosity led Joseph Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, to a career as one of the country’s most prominent chemists.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Seeing Disability Differently

By Susan Ahlborn

By Matt Gelb

By Loraine Terrell

Art on the River

By Jane Carroll

SPRING/SUMMER 2023

SPRING/SUMMER 2023

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Cover Illustration: DAVID MOORE

The Core of the Liberal Arts

As I’m writing this, we are approaching the end of an eventful year. The spring semester began with a toppingoff ceremony for the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology, celebrating an important milestone in a project that is critical to the School’s commitment to advancing energy research. Accomplishments like this are only possible because of the School’s many friends and supporters. Thanks to the generosity of donors who have partnered with us to advance a range of our most important priorities, the School has had much to celebrate this spring (p. 3).

The spring has also been marked by reflection at the School on the importance of disciplines across the liberal arts. While we look to science to provide new pathways to sustainable energy, we also recognize the critical need for policy conversations that reflect an understanding of humanistic perspectives. And as we react to the startling potential of generative AI,

many of us are trying to grapple with what remains distinctly human. Bhuvnesh Jain and Greg Ridgeway, co-directors of the Data Driven Discovery Initiative, discuss the fundamentals of this technology in OMNIA 101: Generative AI (p. 12).

As our faculty from all fields are telling us, the humanities contribute to our understanding of the human impact of critical issues, as well as our ability to communicate effectively about them and engage creatively with communities on both a local and global level. This includes vital discussion about global culture and cultural dynamics here at home—which helps our students to gain perspective and fosters a sense of belonging—and cultivating a code of ethics that we hope all our students will carry out into the world, regardless of their future ambitions.

Most importantly, the humanities provide us with a fundamental understanding of what makes us human, taking on

questions of values, ethics, morality. This is reflected in Seeing Disability Diff erently (p. 34), which examines the emerging field of disability studies from an interdisciplinary perspective.

These are just a few examples of why an education in the humanities is a pillar of a liberal arts education, and why we at Penn Arts & Sciences work continuously to ensure the relevance of our teaching. I hope you enjoy discovering more about the accomplishments of our scholars and how they are working to make the world a better place.

Topping Off the New Home for Energy Science at Penn

The Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation Funds Construction of State-of-the-Art Spectroscopy Facility

The Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation has made a gift to Penn Arts & Sciences and Penn Engineering that funds the construction of a state-of-theart nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facility in the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology (VLEST).

“This gift will have a lasting impact on advancing research in energy and sustainability,” said Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “These spaces will provide

scientists with access to cutting-edge technology and high-performance instruments that will play a key role in groundbreaking collaborative projects.”

“We are excited to support the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology at Penn,” said Ye and Ren. “Science and engineering are at the heart of creating innovative solutions to the world’s energy challenges. We cannot wait to see the breakthroughs and positive impacts on humanity coming out

The Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation is dedicated to supporting research that addresses climate change, helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds access and afford a college education, and increasing the understanding of Asian health needs. The Foundation has previously generously supported Penn in the areas of undergraduate financial aid, the China Education Initiative, and Amy Gutmann Hall, which serves as a hub for crossdisciplinary collaborations that harness expertise, research,

data.

of the lab.”

and

Lisa J. Godfrey

This past February, the Penn community gathered to celebrate the installation of the final beam of the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology (VLEST). Located at 32nd and Walnut Streets, VLEST will provide space for the activities of Penn’s top energy scientists and serve as the home for critical initiatives in energy research and education, accelerating the pace of scientific advances and forging the path to urgently needed solutions. Pictured above at the celebration are (L–R) Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience; Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Penn President Liz Magill; donor P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99; and Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Inaugural Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology.

Mark Devlin and Colleagues Awarded NSF Grant to Upgrade Prominent Observatory

Daniel and Brett Sundheim Gift Supports International Undergraduate Students

Daniel, W’99, and Brett, C’01, Sundheim have made a gift of $10 million that will create the Sundheim International Scholars Fund and the Sundheim Penn First Plus International Opportunity Fund at Penn Arts & Sciences.

The largest portion of this gift, $9 million, will establish the Sundheim International Scholars Fund to provide scholarship aid for international students at Penn Arts & Sciences with demonstrated financial need. The first cohort of Sundheim Scholars will be selected for matriculation in the Fall 2023 semester.

Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and colleagues have been awarded a Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure-2 grant from the National Science Foundation. Devlin will act as the principal investigator, with co-investigators at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and collaborators at other institutions in the United States and abroad. Mathew Madhavacheril, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and James Aguirre, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, will also be instrumental in the project.

The $52.66 million grant will fund a major infrastructure upgrade to the Simons Observatory (SO). Located in the high Atacama Desert in Northern Chile at an altitude of about 17,000 feet, SO provides scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the nature of fundamental physical processes that have governed the origin and evolution of the universe since the dawn of time itself.

A five-year project phase will result in the completion of the upgraded Advanced

Simons Observatory (ASO). These updates will double the mapping speed of the Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) receiver and offer myriad improvements to instrumentation, efficiency, and sustainability as it relates to the observatory, and community-focused data sharing. The project phase will be followed by five years of observations (through 2033), which will produce a legacy large-scale millimeter-wave survey of the sky.

On the sustainability front, ASO will establish a new paradigm for green observatories at remote sites, replacing 70 percent of the power at the site with solar energy, which will save up to 2 million kilograms of CO2 emission per year and allow for more observation, with more sensitive results.

The grant also advances both University and School commitments to data science. The public nature of survey data, and the collaborative atmosphere encouraged by such sharing, means that ASO findings will go on to fuel student projects and papers, creating future leaders in the field. For more work from Devlin, see p. 9.

The $1 million balance of the gift will create the Sundheim Penn First Plus International Opportunity Fund. Penn First Plus provides comprehensive support for students who are the first generation to attend college and/or come from households with modest family incomes.

Throughout Penn’s long history, undergraduates from around the world have added immeasurably to life on campus. “International students bring a wealth of experiences that enrich interactions and learning in and out of the classroom,” said Steven J. Fluharty, Penn Arts & Sciences Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “By bringing this new cohort of international students to the College, the Sundheims are widening the lens through which we all view the world and, as a result, furthering global understanding.”

A view of the Simons Observatory (back left) under construction. The Penn/Princeton Atacama Cosmology Telescope is in the back right. Penn first developed the site, which sits at 17,000 feet in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, in 1998.

Faculty Honored for Outstanding Teaching

These Penn Arts & Sciences faculty and graduate students were recognized for their outstanding teaching and commitment to students in 2023.

Four faculty were honored with University-wide awards.

E. James Petersson, Professor of Chemistry, and Evelyn Thomson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, received the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award conferred by the University. The Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring was given to Marisa Kozlowski, Professor of Chemistry, and Paul K. Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English.

These faculty members and students were recognized with awards from Penn Arts & Sciences:

Ira H. Abrams

Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching

Coren Apicella, Associate Professor of Psychology

Timothy Rommen, Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College and Professor of Music and Africana Studies

Dennis M. DeTurck Award for Innovation in Teaching

Tobias Baumgart, Professor of Chemistry

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty

Maria Alley, Language Program Coordinator and Senior Lecturer, Russian and East European Studies

Anthony Cirri, Lecturer, Chemistry

Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research

Rebecca Waller, Assistant Professor of Psychology

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor

Sarah Gronningsater, Assistant Professor of History

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students

Connor Cassady, Mathematics

Lourdes Contreras, French and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies

Cheryl Hagan, History and Sociology of Science

Jesse Hamilton, Philosophy

Oualid Merzouga, Mathematics

Clancy Murray, Political Science

Keith (KC) O’Hara, History

Peter Satterthwaite, Ancient History

Cassandra Vu, Chemistry

Jacqueline Wallis, Philosophy

Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs

Megan Ruth Elliott, Lecturer, Biochemistry, Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences and Pre-Health Programs

Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs

Martin Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology

College students have questions about their career paths and lives after Penn. Alumni can be there with answers, advice, and guidance, through our online platform. Join this growing community today!

Penn Arts & Sciences 2023 Graduation Ceremonies

The College of Arts & Sciences Graduation Ceremony for the Class of 2023 was held on May 14 at Franklin Field. The featured speaker, Joshua Bennett, C’10, is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, and author of five books who this summer joins the faculty of MIT as a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities. The student speaker, Hoang Le, C’23, W’23, completed a double major in biology and economics through the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management (LSM). Le created the LSM Pipeline Program to work with West Philadelphia high school students, was a

U.N. Millennium Fellow, and won Penn’s Y-Prize competition for an idea using novel steerable needle technology.

The Penn Arts & Sciences Graduate Division held its ceremony on May 12 at the Annenberg Center. The featured speaker was Herman Beavers, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies, a distinguished poet and a widely published scholar of 20th-century American and African American literature. Student speakers included Kimberly Cárdenas, GR’23

(Department of Political Science); Nakul Deshpande, GR’22 (Department of Earth and Environmental Science); and Sara Xia Yu, GR’22 (Department of History).

The College of Liberal and Professional Studies celebrated its graduating class, also on May 14, at the Annenberg Center. Brighid M. Dwyer, the inaugural Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Penn Arts & Sciences, gave the address. Dwyer has 20 years of experience as a practitioner, scholar, and professor addressing issues of equity in higher education.

Lisa J. Godfrey

Joshua Bennett, C’10, award-winning poet, spoken word artist—and student speaker at his own commencement 13 years prior—addressed the Class of 2023 at the College of Arts & Sciences graduation ceremony on May 14 at Franklin Field. “Spend your time with people that help you tap into the most free, unguarded version of yourself,” he said. “This grand adventure is so much better with company. We belong with each other. We are each other. The great gift of your life is meant to be shared.”

Mark Trodden Named Next Associate Dean for Natural Sciences

Mark Trodden, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, will become Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences effective July 1, 2023. In this role, Trodden will oversee the Biology, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Science, Linguistics, Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy, and Psychology departments, along with a number of research centers.

A distinguished theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist, Trodden is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the U.K.’s Institute of Physics. “Mark’s outstanding record as a scholar and an academic leader makes him well-suited to this important role,” says Steven J. Fluharty,

Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience.

Trodden served as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 2014 to 2022 and has served as co-director of the Center for Particle Cosmology since 2009. He is a former Chair of the School of Arts & Sciences’ Personnel Committee, has been a member of the School’s Planning and Priorities Committee, and in 2016 chaired a school-wide Task Force on Standing Faculty Assessment. He has also served as a member of the U.S. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel and is currently a member of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute.

Courtesy of Mark Trodden

Mark Trodden, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics

2,800 Years of Ideas

Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, and Peter Struck, Professor of Classical Studies, examine the history of ideas as co-editors of a new book series.

BY KATELYN SILVA

ow do you capture the nature of ideas over the course of 2,800 years? How do you adequately convey how each distinct time period and social, political, and cultural context shaped the development of those ideas?

These are the weighty questions that Sophia Rosenfeld and Peter Struck set out to answer as co-editors of the series, A Cultural History of Ideas, which was recognized by the 2023 Association of American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards) for best work in the category of Single & Multivolume Reference and Textbooks in Humanities.

The series features expert contributors across six volumes covering Classical Antiquity, the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the Modern Age. Each volume has identical chapter titles and themes that cohesively organize the series: Knowledge; the Human Self; Ethics and Social Relations; Politics and Economies; Nature; Religion and the Divine; Language, Poetry, and Rhetoric; the Arts; and History.

When the British publisher Bloomsbury approached Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, about editing a series on the cultural history of ideas, she was tentative. “That’s a big idea in and of itself. My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly do this by myself. The only way I

could possibly imagine doing it is if Peter Struck did it with me,” she says.

Fortunately, Struck, Professor of Classical Studies, was intrigued. “When Sophia came to me with the idea, I was delighted, but we asked each other, ‘Is it crazy to think about doing almost 3,000 years of intellectual history in a coherent way—in a way that’s going to contribute something new to our field?’”

The scale of the project was undoubtedly large. The pair would co-edit six books in total. Within each book, there would be a series of sub-editors of different volumes. Every volume included multiple essays. Rosenfeld explains the process of tackling the herculean project: “The first major challenge was coming up with categories that would make equal sense whether we were talking about Athens in the ancient period or Western Europe in the 1950s. Would concepts like nature, the divine, the arts, or even the self, make sense across those moments?”

Together, Rosenfeld and Struck also had to identify the right contributors for the essays. They carefully considered who was doing interesting work in how ideas emerged, how ideas were put into practice, and how ideas were adopted and remade over time. Rosenfeld and Struck didn’t want the contributions to be just a “history of the famous thinkers lined up in a row,” says Rosenfeld.

With 62 handpicked expert contributors featured in the series, Rosenfeld and Struck are confident they’ve accomplished their goal of adding something new to the field. The essays explore questions like: What did it mean to think about religion in a world that doesn’t resemble our religious landscape? What did it mean to think about rhetoric and speech in a world that doesn’t treat speech the way we do? And what conditions are responsible for these differences?

“Part of what we’re doing here is to claim that ideas don’t just float around in space as prepackaged, little quanta of thinking that bounce around from place to place,” Struck explains. “They’re produced in particular social contexts for particular reasons, and that means that there’s a distinct way each age and each culture constructs knowledge for itself.”

Rosenfeld and Struck say they hope readers will come away from the series— whether having read every volume or just one essay—feeling differently about the world in which they live. Rosenfeld adds, “My hope is that the reader will come back to the present and think, ‘Hmm, the assumptions that I’ve made about my world are also really culturally embedded and specific; they’re not universals, but they’re particular to my own time and place and susceptible to change, too.’”

A Detailed Map of Dark Matter, Revealed

BY NATHI MAGUBANE

or millennia, humans have been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos. From ancient civilizations to modern-day astronomers, the allure of the starry sky has inspired countless quests to unravel the secrets of the universe.

Although models explaining the cosmos have existed for centuries, the field of cosmology—in which scientists employ quantitative methods to gain insights into the universe’s evolution and structure—is comparatively nascent. It was established in the early 20th century with the development of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which now serves as the basis for the standard model of cosmology.

Now, a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal by researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration has revealed a groundbreaking new image that shows the most detailed map of matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky, reaching deep into the cosmos. It confirms Einstein’s theory about how massive structures grow and bend light, with a test that spans the entire age of the universe.

“We’ve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang,” says Mathew Madhavacheril, lead author of one of the papers and an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe and the rate at

which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution are just what you’d expect from our standard model of cosmology.”

The authors attribute the lumpiness quality to the uneven distribution of dark matter throughout the universe; its growth, they say, has remained consistent with earlier predictions. And, despite making up 85 percent of the universe and influencing its evolution, dark matter has been hard to detect because it doesn’t interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. As far as we know, dark matter only interacts with gravity.

Backed by National Science Foundation funding, Penn and Princeton University built the ACT and, in 2007, started observations to track down the elusive dark matter. The more than 160 collaborators who have since used the telescope, situated in the Chilean Andes, observe light that emanated following the dawn of the universe’s formation, the Big Bang—when the universe was only 380,000 years old. Cosmologists often refer to this diffuse light as the “baby picture of the universe,” but formally it is known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

The team tracks how the gravitational pull of large, heavy structures including dark matter warps the CMB on its 14-billion-year journey to us, like how a magnifying glass bends light as it passes through its lens.

“When we proposed this experiment in 2003, we had no idea the full extent of information that could be extracted from our telescope,” says Mark Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the deputy director of ACT. “We owe this to the cleverness of the theorists, the many people who built new instruments to make our telescope more sensitive, and the new analysis techniques our team came up with.”

Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences, have led research mapping dark matter by using visible light emitted from relatively nearby galaxies as opposed to light from the CMB. “Interestingly, we found matter to be a little less lumpy than the simplest theory predicts,” Jain says. “However, Mark and Mathew’s beautiful work on the CMB agrees perfectly with the theory.”

ACT, which operated for 15 years, was decommissioned in September 2022. Nevertheless, the team expects to submit more papers presenting results from the final observations soon, and starting in 2024, the Simons Observatory will conduct future observations at the same site, with a new telescope capable of mapping the sky almost 10 times faster than ACT. For more about the work, see p. 4.

Research led by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration maps the universe’s cosmic growth, confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Talking With “Aliens”

BY MARILYN PERKINS

How can talking like an alien help advance our understanding of language? Gareth Roberts, Associate Professor of Linguistics, directs the Cultural Evolution of Language Lab, where he uses experimental techniques like artificial languages and interactive games to explore how social pressures shape language over time.

These miniature languages can include from 2 to 20 new words with variable endings and different dialects. This approach allows linguists to study language learning and evolution in a structured setting, akin to how researchers in the biological sciences use model organisms like fruit flies or mice for their easily manipulated genetic systems and fast reproductive cycles.

In addition, Roberts often builds games that feature player-to-player dialogue and stylized alien creatures. By manipulating the linguistic features associated with particular social traits of the “alien” languages—like a certain suffix being linked in players’ minds with a personality trait—Roberts can see how social factors influence language evolution.

One avenue of the lab’s research concerns how social biases can hinder effective communication. Roberts, with collaborators Masha Fedzechkina and

Lucy Hall Hartley at the University of Arizona, mimicked this effect of social pressure in a study published in 2022 in the journal Language Acquisition. In the experiment, participants met two species of aliens, each with its own dialect of the same artificial language, in which words could be arranged in multiple, ambiguous orders. One of the alien species’ dialects included suffixes that helped reduce that ambiguity; the dialect of the other left the meaning unclear.

As participants learned the alien language, they received messages that encouraged them either to feel the same about the two alien species or to prefer one over the other. When participants saw messages that made them feel more negatively about the aliens who used the clarifying suffixes, the participants dropped the suffixes in their own writing.

“The social pressure pushed people into a position where they were sharing sentences that were really ambiguous and did not do a good job of communicating the statement they wanted to communicate,” says Roberts. “It may be that social pressures play a very powerful role.”

The gamelike structure of these alien language experiments sets them apart from traditional psycholinguistic research, which can feel more like a test

and doesn’t always capture the engaging nature of real-world language use. With games, Roberts says, “people tend to be very engaged, and they often care quite a lot about what happens.”

In a study published in 2018 in the journal Cognition, Roberts used one of these games to investigate how and why speakers pick up different dialects. Participants played as one of two species of aliens, chatting with each other and collecting resources by trading or fighting. Each species of alien—the weak, scrawny Wiwos and the tough, brawny Burls—had its own attributes and dialects. Roberts found that in the experiments where participants could fight to collect resources, the participants—even those assigned as Wiwos—started to pick up the dialect of the tougher Burls. The findings, he says, suggest that people tend to borrow linguistic features from groups with traits they value.

In the future, Roberts says he hopes to run his artificial language experiments for even longer—potentially building languages over weeks or months rather than hours or days—and bring his games out of the lab. “I’m interested in the possibility of larger-scale experiments, where people take part using an app or on an online experimental platform.”

Linguist Gareth Roberts uses ‘alien’ languages and interactive games to show how social pressures shape our communication.

Bridging the Partisan Divide With Ordinary Conversation

BY MATT GELB

They had reserved the space at a Bucks County library for two hours and recruited strangers through Facebook ads for conversations between Democrats and Republicans, but Matt Levendusky was not sure what to do when two people remained past the scheduled time. “Well,” Levendusky said to his research assistants, “should we say something to them?” A librarian, who needed the room, made the decision for everyone.

But the two people, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, exchanged information and vowed to continue their discussion. Levendusky, a professor of political science and the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, held these experiments across the Delaware Valley four years ago. They were civil. They were instructive. “Often people came up to us at the end, and they said, ‘Oh, I learned something more than I thought I would by talking with people who are different than me. I got a new perspective,’” Levendusky says. “That’s kind of nice.”

In his new book, Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide, Levendusky explores methods to reduce

the animosity between political factions—an optimistic concept, but one he believes is prudent.

Those conversations—often not as memorable as the two people who lingered that afternoon at the library— shaped an idea Levendusky had pursued about American identity in a charged political landscape. These were “ordinary exchanges,” as Levendusky termed them, and there was something to them.

“If I’m a Democrat and I think about Republicans,” Levendusky says, “I’m likely to think about the person who’s on my Facebook feed talking about how the media have it in for Donald Trump, or someone I see interviewed at one of his rallies. But these people are quite atypical, and I might feel differently about a more

typical Republican. Part of what links the strategies in the book is trying to get people to reduce some of these misperceptions to dampen some of that animosity.”

Those misperceptions, as Levendusky writes, are not the only explanation for animus. But they are an important one. There is strong evidence to show a rise in “affective polarization”—a phenomenon that underscores the hatred between the two sides despite, at times, smaller disagreements on actual issues.

“So Democrats or Republicans, for example, say that they don’t want to be neighbors with one another,” Levendusky says. “They don’t want to work with one another. They don’t want to even do completely apolitical things with one another. It’s this

sense of animosity often at a personal level that is distinct from the fact that Democrats or Republicans might take different positions on, say, taxes or abortion.”

Of course, there is no eliminating the acrimony across the political spectrum, but it can, perhaps, be reduced. “Part of it is just about getting people to realize that there can be legitimate differences without that breaking down into animosity,” Levendusky says. This is why he returns to those ordinary exchanges. There are artificial barriers because people believe political conversations are inherently conflictual and uncivil.

“We saw what would happen when we have them engage in a civil cross-party exchange,” Levendusky says. “It’s interesting because people do find out that they agree with the other side more than they thought they would. But a more important factor behind these effects is realizing, ‘Oh, actually, I can disagree without being disagreeable. And I can also see that they have some reasonable positions, even if I disagree with them.’”

This is why, in Levendusky’s view, it’s time to have more productive conversations.

In his new book, Matt Levendusky, Professor of Political Science, explores methods to reduce the animosity between political factions.

GENERATIVE AI

Bhuvnesh Jain and Greg Ridgeway, co-directors of the Data

Driven Discovery Initiative, explain ChatGPT and generative AI, and what this technology means for learning and education.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Illustration by Marcin Wolski

OMNIA 101 offers readers a peek into what faculty do each day in their classrooms and how their research and expertise are inspiring the next generation.

With the release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing search engine, generative AI is on people’s minds. Chatbots can retrieve information, create code, and, in some cases, participate in conversations that can feel eerily human. But how do these AI chatbots work, and what does it mean for learning and education? To find out, we spoke with the co-directors of Penn Arts & Sciences’ Data Driven Discovery Initiative, Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences, and Greg Ridgeway, Professor and Chair of Criminology.

How does generative AI work?

BJ: Essentially all the text that exists on the internet is fed into a deep learning network with the goal of ranking the set of words that are most likely to occur next, given a prompt. It doesn’t know any underlying logic, whether it’s the logic of grammar or math or causation. It simply makes the best possible guess based on the preceding sequence of words and its huge “training data.”

Are there meaningful differences between chatbots?

GR: The training dataset is really key in this model of just trying to predict the next word. If you train a chatbot on The New York Times, for example, it’s going to have a particular style that replicates the kind of vocabulary and phrases in that publication. If you train it on Twitter, it’s going to be wildly di erent.

Recently, I guided students through a simulated live ChatGPT learning session. In a 90-minute class, they were able to produce code for the challenging task of how to separate a star and a galaxy in faint images—one of the central image analysis problems in astronomy. I didn’t expect them to understand everything, but they understood enough.

And then there is the fact that private organizations own the chatbots. We don’t know how they decide on guardrails. I played with this idea and asked

a chatbot to write a plan to overturn the 2020 election. And it would not do that. It chastised me and said I should have more trust in my elected o cials. That is a stance the chatbot has not learned from the internet as a whole, but because someone engineered the bot in a certain direction.

What does the rise of generative AI mean for your research?

GR: For a criminologist, there are a lot of data buried in text records. For example, we might look at a transcript to see whether a case involved defensive gun use. Previously, researchers would either rely on armies of research assistants or customized, task-specific machine-learning algorithms. But now you can pull the data more easily and start on analysis.

BJ: In astronomy and physics, numbers and images and plots are very important, and they’re not things ChatGPT is designed for. But even in my field, I find its ability to summarize quite complex parts of the literature quite impressive. It makes mistakes, but it is also able to answer questions about subtle topics like light bending by a black hole.

What about the classroom?

GR: I teach a data science class and the typical student has never coded before. In the past, my goal was to teach them how to write code from scratch. But now ChatGPT and other code builders can do that for them. So, I’ve raised my expectations for what my students can do. For students, there is a lot of distance between asking the question and using data to answer it. But with ChatGPT as an aide, the distance shrinks.

BJ: I totally agree. Recently, I guided students through a simulated live ChatGPT learning session. In a 90-minute class, they were able to

produce code for the challenging task of how to separate a star and a galaxy in faint images—one of the central image analysis problems in astronomy. I didn’t expect them to understand everything, but they understood enough. And then in a follow-up lecture, I was able to walk them through and deepen their understanding.

What is the future of generative AI?

BJ: I think at least every six months, we’re going to learn about capabilities that will surprise us. It may seem like a cliché, but I’m quite excited and occasionally scared about possibilities we have not even foreseen.

It will certainly improve on its existing capabilities. But as with technological changes of the past, which ones will actually get adopted on a large scale remains to be seen. I think there’s a good chance that its impact on scientific research will be largely positive. No guarantees, but I expect generative AI will boost learning, it will boost exploration, and emerge as a versatile digital assistant.

(L–R) Greg Ridgeway, Professor and Chair of Criminology; Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences

RUSSIA AND THE WEST

In an undergraduate course in Russian and East European studies, students tackle the question of Russian identity.

By Jane Carroll

When D. Brian Kim arrived at Penn in fall 2018, one of the first undergraduate classes he taught was Russia and the West. He taught it again this spring—amid the most serious geopolitical conflict between Russia and its European neighbors in decades.

An assistant professor in Russian and East European studies (REES), Kim was drawn to Russian studies by a fascination with the language. “I have always

been interested in languages,” says Kim, who attended a boarding school in high school where his dorm head was a Russian teacher. “At first I thought, ‘Oh, here’s a cool new alphabet.’ The grammar is really complicated, and it was just this puzzle.”

As Kim studied the language, he immersed himself in Russian literature and culture. He earned a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literature from Stanford

University, and decided to focus his studies on the question of how Russians have related to other peoples throughout history, including Russia’s position between the East and West. “It seemed sometimes to be Europe and sometimes to be Asia, and very often to be neither, depending on who was talking and what their goals were,” he says. “So, ‘Russia and the Other’ is a concise encapsulation, I suppose, of my own interests.”

D. Brian Kim, assistant professor in Russian and East European studies, teaches the undergraduate course Russia and the West.

Brooke Sietinsons

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, these questions have taken on greater urgency, and Kim adjusted the course in light of current events. The class began with broad theoretical approaches to the question of where Russia has situated itself, including historical perspectives and more modern ones, before backtracking to provide a historical overview from the 10th to the 20th centuries.

“One of the changes I made was that we spent a very early class looking at Vladimir Putin’s official Kremlin speeches over the past year, starting with the invasion of Ukraine and ending on his New Year’s address of this year,” says Kim.

For students, that drove home that the question of Russia and the West is extremely relevant to this present moment, he says.

The class, which is offered each year, fulfills general education requirements and thus draws from a cross-section of the undergraduate population. Majors such as political science and international relations are well represented, and about a quarter of the students are in the natural sciences.

For Catherine Fantuzzo, C’24, who is double majoring in REES and comparative literature, this class was a natural fit for her interests. “I took this course because of its relationship to the ‘holy trinity’ of Russian literature, history, and international relations historically,” she says.

Students read canonical authors such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Voltaire, as well as lesser-known works, plays, and travelogues.

One reading that generates interest among students is a four-act play called Woe from Wit, by Alexander Griboedov, which portrays Russia on the heels of the Napoleonic wars. “It’s funny, which is always helpful,” says Kim, “and it’s a dramatization of the ways in which Russian society changed coming from the 18th

century, when there was an openness to the cultural emulation of Western Europe, and particularly France. In the wake of war with France, that obviously shifts a bit. So, it’s a moment where there is a reckoning in Russian identity, where we start seeing the interest in asking what it really means to be Russian.”

In fact, he says, the course is as much about Russia and itself as it is about Russia and the West, since the West has so often been the mirror against which Russia measures itself.

Fantuzzo was especially struck by learning about the rule of Catherine the Great. “Much of her reign was dedicated to making sure that Russia appeared more Western than it did despotic to Western Europe,” she says. “Up until Peter I and Catherine II, Russia’s international perception as viewed from the Europe of the 1800s was one shrouded in mystery and ‘otherness,’ and Catherine poured her energy into making the Western elements of Russian culture known to the West by incorporating primarily Enlightenment values.”

For this reason, says Fantuzzo, reading Putin’s speeches, followed by learning about Russia’s interactions with Europe over the ensuing centuries, made for a jarring contrast.

Kim says one goal with this class is to have students question the very concepts of Russia and the West. He says, “Over the course of the semester, students come to understand that these are variable categories that can be morphed and shifted to suit the needs of whoever is deploying them at any given time, in any given context.”

Another key point that Kim wants students to understand is the Russian conception of its own exceptionalism, the Russian idea of a Messianic destiny, which he says has had multiple iterations during the past millennium. He thinks this lies at

RUSSIA AND THE WEST A Reading List

To get a taste of what Penn undergraduates learn and discuss in the course Russia and the West, D. Brian Kim, Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies, suggests the following texts:

A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism

BY ANDRZEJ WALICKI

A broad overview of the intellectual currents that have gone into the making of Russian identity over the past few centuries.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

A semi-fictional travelogue from Dostoevsky’s travels in France and Britain in the 1860s.

The Russian Idea

BY NIKOLAI BERDYAEV

This early-20th-century text explores the Russian self-conception of having a special destiny or mission and the drive to bring the rest of the world into line with this mission.

the base of Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine in terms of protecting Russian sovereignty.

“That doesn’t make any sense from our point of view,” Kim says, “if you don’t understand the 1,000 years that led up to the making of these statements and the cultural currents that have gone into the shaping of these narratives.”

Fantuzzo says the literature provides an excellent tool for “adopting the lens by which Russia looks at the West. I am a big proponent of studying literature for this reason. Russian literature is a primary source for understanding the culture and the mind of the people. Everyone at Penn should take this course.”

ROOT OF THE MATTER

Human rights advocate Eva Maria Lewis, C’21, seeks to address root causes of gun violence through investment and empowerment.

By Ava DiFabritiis

Eva Maria Lewis, C’21, awakened to the disparities within her hometown of Chicago at a young age. On long commutes from her neighborhood of South Shore—a community a ected by gun violence and systemic issues like disinvestment—to her school on the North Side, she realized how di erent her life might have looked. As a junior in high school, she founded Free Root Operation (FRO), a nonprofit focused on combatting gun violence in Chicago’s Black and Brown communities. Throughout her time at Penn, the organization’s influence continued to grow.

With her degree in sociology and funding from the 2021 Reebok Human Rights Award, Lewis is accelerating her on-the-ground e orts to create opportunity and provide resources. “I approach the work from a place that’s less charitable and more symbiotic,” she says. “Because in freeing some of these people, I’m freeing myself.”

What motivated you to start your own nonprofit?

From kindergarten on, I had to go outside of my neighborhood to get an equitable education. For high school, I tested into Walter Payton College Prep. That was my first time on the North Side of Chicago. I didn’t know there were areas of the city that were strong communities with modern infrastructure and resources.

The first protest I attended was a youth march after Trayvon Martin was killed. Especially for Black young people, that was the moment we realized that what we were learning in our history books was actually the present; we weren’t so removed from the Civil Rights movement.

I went into high school with that lens, paired with my observations about the stark di erences between my community and the community where I was being educated, as well as

Anna Jung-Hwa; Courtesy of Eva Maria Lewis

Eva Maria Lewis, C’ (above), and participating in a photo shoot (inset) with members of the  BLOOM cohort.

educators’ inability to exercise equity when it comes to students dealing with barriers like poverty. I started being active through a coalition, Youth for Black Lives. I started to wonder what it would look like for our communities to be equitable.

How did you build momentum?

It was just blessings because people were bringing my name up. One of my gifts is public speaking and getting people to understand things that they usually don’t understand. Coming from a community affected by poverty-induced gun violence, I talked about it in a way that rallied people to shift their thinking from mediating gun violence through policy alone to root causes. I had a viral TED Talk during my first year at Penn, and I’ve used the power of social media.

After years in organizing and activism, I was blessed to have the budget to gain 501(c)(3) status for FRO in 2020. With that status and my first employees, I had a lot more support and access to resources. We got to work and found our footing.

How did you integrate your studies at Penn with your work in Chicago?

I was a bit of a menace. Some people questioned how I would succeed if I continued to care about my community. But there were angels at Penn, especially in the sociology department and Kelly Writers House, who invested in me because they saw the validity in my work.

In doing sociology literature reviews, I couldn’t find much information about gun violence, which was a limitation. I wanted to build out that information. I started the first community needs and assets assessment for my neighborhood, talking to 500-plus people about what they wanted South Shore to look like. I worked with Penn professors, in particular professor Regina

Baker, to analyze and synthesize this data through my coursework. We were surprised to find that one of the things people cared about the most was incorporating leisure into the community.

FRO launched the BLOOM cohort in 2022. Tell us about the program.

BLOOM addresses gun violence through investment rather than through policing and governmental public safety infrastructure. The program leads Black women, particularly single mothers, through a six-month journey where they learn about self-care, nourishment, and transformation. We pair them with a social worker who helps them learn how to set and attain goals. To graduate from the program, they have to have attained a goal.

Why single mothers?

BLOOM came from my own experience as the daughter of a single mother, along with the merging of my academic career with my community work career. During the uprisings of 2020, we started the Chicago Food Pairing Program. All of the grocery stores on the South and West Sides were closed, so we paired people up north and in the suburbs to grocery shop for families in our communities. We serviced 543 heads of households, and we could count on our hands how many were men. It was mostly Black single mothers. We felt a need to directly respond.

How did BLOOM come together?

People took a risk on us; when we first reached out, we were still figuring out an infrastructure. It went from zero to 100 so quick. Top restaurants donated full platters to feed these women at our events; we had everything from Jamaican food to Puerto Rican food to tapas. Brands, some of them Blackowned, donated luxury items for our

graduation gift bags. We had people like Broadway In Chicago reach out to give us tickets, exposing these women to leisure experiences that they didn’t have access to because those were considered to be for people of a high class. As a result, the capacity of these women to dream and have self-agency and autonomy increased.

The event I was most proud of was an industry-level photo shoot for the ladies, where a photographer, celebrity stylist, makeup artists, and hair stylists donated their time. Seeing the ladies step out of their comfort zones in front of the cameras was awesome. That was the day when I said, “What we’re doing here is magical.”

Are you optimistic about the future? What is your hope for Chicago and other communities?

Resilience is a reason to be optimistic. My people, Black and Indigenous, are making so much progress to heal ourselves and find ways to invest in ourselves. That is a testament to our commitment to proceed, progress, grow, and make a home even though our home was stolen. Like Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.”

My approach is to get people to dream, because I believe that colonialism stole our imagination and our ability to create infrastructures that replace those that don’t serve us. I want to see people living freely, being able to rest—especially single mothers. There is a plethora of Black single mothers in disenfranchised communities, but there are not resources to pour into them and to provide for them. I want them to be invested in instead of shamed and ignored. I want everyone to feel like they have an equitable path toward freedom that has nothing to do with adverse mechanisms of survival. I want us to move out of a scarcity mindset and into abundance.

clues clues The in the Chemistry Chemistry

Childhood curiosity led Joseph S. Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, to a career as one of the country’s most prominent atmospheric chemists.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Illustrations by David Moore

On stock-

The foggy days stayed with him. It was on foggy days, the kind where a fine mist held in the air, that Joe Francisco noticed that the young women at Lamar University were reluctant to leave the student union and head to class. On foggy days, their stockings melted on their skin and silk scarves became dotted with holes.

Francisco was a high school student hanging out at Lamar, in Beaumont, Texas, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was pretty cool to tell his friends that he’d spent the weekend mingling with college students. And Lamar had a whole building dedicated to chemistry—also pretty cool to a budding scientist. Back then, in the early 1970s, Francisco had no way of knowing that the strange fog had anything to do with the nearby oil refinery. No one did.

1970s, Francisco had no way of knowing that the strange fog had anything to do

“At that time, we did not know anything

“At that time, we did not know anything about acid rain,” Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, recalls.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, scientists began publishing about acid rain and the underlying chemistry behind it. Research revealed that crude oil when processed, like from the refinery in Beaumont, emits sulfur dioxide, which then oxidizes. The result can lead to an acid rain event, which can have widespread ecological effects. And, as it turns out, melt nylon stockings. Modeling showed that the oxidation process took about 13 days. But fog didn’t hang over Beaumont for that long.

“The research out of the ’70s and ’80s was correct. No qualms about it,” says Francisco. “But it couldn’t explain what I saw and what others experienced. There had to be something else.”

When he came to Penn in 2018, Francisco, who is also a professor of chemistry and the former president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), set

Joseph S. Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science

out to find what was missing. With his research group, he discovered a new mechanism for acid rain generation. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2019 and more recent experimental validation came in that same journal in 2022. Decades later, the high school kid hanging out at the student union had found an explanation behind the foggy-day phenomenon.

Francisco’s career has taken him from his student days at the University of Texas at Austin and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to professorships at Purdue University, the University of Nebraska, and Penn. He now lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Priya, an economist, and their three daughters. He’s held research positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Cambridge, and the Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology. He has published more than 700 journal articles, written 10 book chapters, and co-authored the textbook Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics. His accolades and recognition include memberships in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as election to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and awards from the National Science Foundation and American Chemical Society.

Chief among his scientific achievements is the application of new computational tools of physical chemistry to bring deep insight into the underlying chemistry of the atmosphere. “The problem with the existing experimental techniques is that they destroyed some of the critical chemistry in their processes,” Francisco says. “So, what we did was use computational chemistry.”

He describes how he and his research team used computer modeling to determine all possible reactions that might occur if certain chemicals were released into the atmosphere. At the time, fellow scientists were suspicious of computational chemistry results. But Francisco persisted, certain that the findings could provide a roadmap for new discoveries by suggesting where in the atmosphere to look and what type of chemistry to look for. “What started happening,” he says, “is that we began to discover things that people had missed for 50 years, simply because they didn’t know where to look.”

insight into the effect our own changing atmosphere may have on global temperatures.

“Looking at chemistry on other planets has always given us inspiration,” Francisco says. “What we’ve learned from those planets and the atmospheric conditions on those planets can guide us in terms of how to make life better on our own planet.”

Lifelong Learner

Analyzing the chlorine- and sulfur-rich chemistry of Venus is pretty advanced stuff, but everybody has to start somewhere. Francisco started on the railroad tracks in Beaumont, tracks that carried chemicals from cargo ships in the Gulf of Mexico to local oil refineries. Inevitably, there were spills. “As a kid, I was curious about it: What were those things on the railroad track?” he remembers.

Francisco’s methods and curiosity have taken him to the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and different planets, but he always has Earth in mind. Take Venus, for example. The second planet from the sun has a significant amount of chlorine in its atmosphere, and the element exhibits similar chemical behaviors on Venus and Earth. So, when investigating how chlorine levels affect our planet’s ozone layer, Venus provides a good model and reference. Its gas makeup also means that Venus experiences what Francisco calls “runaway global warming.” Studying the gases in Venus’s atmosphere gives scientists

“I would kind of do the smell test and do the touch test. Thank God I didn’t do the taste test!” Not content with what his senses could tell him, Francisco headed to the library to learn more. A high school job at a pharmacy only increased his interest in chemistry.

That led him to the campus of Lamar, where he made the foggyday observation that stayed with him for decades. At first, Francisco hung around the student union and kept his eye on the chemistry building, wondering what it would be like to be a college student. A faculty member took notice and gave him a tour, showing him a gas chromatography instrument, a tool that can separate a mixture into its chemical components. Francisco’s reaction? “Wow, I think I can build one of those.”

Looking at chemistry on other planets has always given us inspiration. What we’ve learned from those planets and the atmospheric conditions on those planets can guide us in terms of how to make life better on our own planet.

(L–R) Francisco with his award-winning gas chromatograph. “I did not know at the time it would change everything,” he says, reflecting on this early success and the support shown by his high school teachers like Irene McKnight (top) and Earnest E. Bartlett. They were instrumental in shaping his path forward, he says, encouraging his curiosity and love of science by providing him equipment, entering his work into competitions, even submitting a college application on his behalf.

He got to work gathering materials at the city dump. He’d then bike the parts over to his high school physics teacher’s house, where the young Francisco had permission to use the teacher’s machine shop. A chemistry teacher got in on the act and enrolled the homemade chromatography apparatus in a state-wide science competition, which Francisco won. “It actually worked,” he says. “And you didn’t have to spend $50,000. You could just build one out of junk.”

Despite Francisco’s talent for chemistry, college wasn’t a given for him. In fact, he didn’t even apply. No one had ever talked to him about college or what the application process entailed. So, he was surprised when he got a call from a professor in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin saying that

he’d been admitted. Turns out, his chemistry and physics teachers had submitted an application on his behalf.

“I’m just very, very grateful to some good high school teachers who had a real belief in me,” Francisco says. “They saw something in me and wanted to make sure that I had an opportunity to grow my interest and my curiosity.”

The number of teachers who saw Francisco’s talent and skill only grew as his education continued. Recalling his first college chemistry course, Francisco says, “I was one of two African American students in a class of 350. Toward the end of the semester, the professor called me into his office and I thought, ‘Uh oh, I’m in trouble.’” As it turned out, the professor, Raymond E. Davis, wanted to gauge

Francisco’s interest in research. Francisco jumped at the opportunity and became the lone freshman in a lab of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows researching X-ray crystallography, a topic he continues to study today.

students

By his sophomore year, Francisco ended

surprising source.

By his sophomore year, Francisco knew he wanted to make a career in research, and by junior year, he was taking graduate courses. He considered a variety of graduate schools but ended up choosing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research took a new direction thanks to a surprising source.

“Back in 1977, there was a cool movie that came out called Star Wars, and in that cool movie there was the lightsaber,” he says. “I just found that so interesting. At MIT, they had a number of people doing research with lasers, in particular, how does laser light interact with chemical entities? What does that do to the properties of molecules? The coupling of physics and chemistry, for me, was fascinating.”

As a graduate student, Francisco began publishing papers. One day, a man with a “funny accent” showed up at the lab and invited him out to lunch. “And what graduate student would turn down a free lunch?” Francisco asks. That man was Robert Gilbert from the University

I’m just very, very grateful to some good high school teachers who had a real belief in me. They saw something in me and wanted to make sure that I had an opportunity to grow my interest and my curiosity.

teachers who had a real interest and my curiosity.

Courtesy of Joseph Francisco

of Sydney, and Francisco ended up getting more than just a meal. Their meeting concluded with an invitation to research alongside Gilbert, and before long, Francisco was on his way to Australia for a six-month stay.

When he was back stateside finishing his doctorate at MIT, another man with another accent showed up at the lab. This time, it was a researcher from the University of Oxford who had heard about Francisco from Australian colleagues. Francisco was, as he jokes, “geographically challenged,” and he wondered if the visit presented him an opportunity to return to Texas. Oxford, Texas, that is, some 300 miles west of Beaumont. Alas, the visiting scientist was from Oxford, England, but he did get Francisco to consider another international research experience. After graduating from MIT, he headed to the University of Cambridge for a postdoctoral fellowship.

When his postdoc finished, Francisco was at a crossroads. Head back to the United States, or stay in England? He considered a job opportunity that would have allowed him the best of both: A British manufacturing company with a U.S. branch needed a scientist well-versed in American and British systems. In the end, Francisco knew that research was too important to him and his path was in academia. “Research has always been fun for me,” he explains. “It allows me to explore my curiosity and keep learning.”

Taking the Lead

Francisco’s education was marked by teachers and mentors who believed in him, inspired him, and challenged him. Once established in his career, student became master. Or, to harken back to the “cool movie” that shaped

his doctoral research, Luke became Obi-Wan. Through his teaching and leadership roles with the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) and the ACS, Francisco has sought to introduce the next generation of scientists to new and ever-expanding opportunities.

NOBCChE, an organization founded in the early 1970s to promote the professional advancement and development of Black chemists and chemical engineers, is now largely focused on education starting at the K-12 level. From 2005 to 2007 Francisco was the NOBCChE president, a role he remains proud of. After his tenure as president ended, he thought his days of national leadership were done. But the American Chemical Society had noticed his work with NOBCChE and asked him to consider running for the ACS presidency.

“When I got that call, I thought one of my students was pranking me,” Francisco remembers.

Once he was sure the invitation wasn’t a prank, he had some thinking to do. The ACS presidency would be a demanding job, on top of his responsibilities as a professor and researcher. What could he accomplish in that role?

Ultimately, Francisco ran and was elected on a platform of preparing students for a world of global chemistry and entrepreneurship. Making it happen involved changes to undergraduate and graduate curricula and creating international exchange programs with businesses and educational institutions. Today, ACS offers resources to guide undergraduates in selecting a study-abroad program and career planning workshops for graduate students interested in pursuing positions in academia, government, industry, and nonprofit work.

More recently, Francisco took the helm as co-lead of the Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative. Along with Kathleen Morrison, Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology, Francisco directs the initiative in its mission to meaningfully impact environmental challenges. Founded in 2020, the group works to facilitate innovative research, helps to recruit and retain outstanding faculty members, and develops educational programs.

Working across the University is key to the initiative’s mission. And it’s part of what drew Francisco to Penn in the first place.

Many places use buzzwords like “interdisciplinary” and “transdisciplinary,” but Penn actually made it happen, he says. “The structure was there to make it easier for students and researchers to work across boundaries.”

He adds, “The opportunity to lead the Environmental Innovations Initiative was a chance to build upon Penn’s rich history of multidisciplinarity, but

within the modern context, make it very impactful.”

Since the initiative launched, Francisco, Morrison, and a team of faculty advisors and staff have created connections across Penn and around the world. They started a faculty fellowship program that includes representatives from each of Penn’s 12 schools and worked with each school to establish a set of tailored Academic Climate Commitments. The initiative builds local and global partnerships with community collaborations at events from Penn Climate Week to the U.N. climate change conference (COP 27) held in Egypt in November 2022.

Catalyst for Change

The accolades and leadership roles are nice—they allow Francisco to advocate for the type of large-scale change that can affect the state of education for generations of students—but it is important to Francisco that he connects with students individually, too. He remembers the teachers who motivated him and how thrilling he found research, even as a young man.

“In my experience,” he says, “getting a student involved in research can be

transformative. If a student tells me they find research exciting, I want to create as many opportunities as possible for them to explore their curiosity and make what is in the textbook come alive. The whole process is fun, and I want them to see that.”

Throughout his career, Francisco has retained the curiosity that motivated his first experiments on the railroad tracks in Beaumont. Back then, he had no idea what those spills meant for him and his community.

“This was before there was any talk of environmental justice. We had chemical explosions practically every year. Refineries were right smack in minority communities,” he says. “We had no idea what was being released into the atmosphere and we had no understanding of how people’s health was being compromised. And surely, health was being compromised. I know mine was.”

He remembers frequent childhood asthma attacks that ceased when he left his hometown and had distance from the refineries and the chemicals they released into the atmosphere. He explains, “At the time, I didn’t know why I had asthma attacks in Beaumont but not in Austin. We didn’t make the kinds of connections we’re able to make today.”

Now, Francisco says that education is the most important tool in combating climate change and working for environmental justice. Atmospheric chemistry has a role to play, from investigating how the release of chemicals affects the ozone layer and our warming planet to the chemistry of our own bodies. Sometimes this research causes pushback, like early in Francisco’s career, when he began researching chlorofluorocarbons, manmade compounds of carbon, chlorine, and fluorine that function as coolants in refrigeration systems, among other uses.

The use of chlorofluorocarbons in consumer products such as vehicles and refrigerators required that they be

extremely stable in the face of extreme heat or fire. The prevailing wisdom went, due to their stability in harsh environments, the compounds could not pose a safety risk when released into the atmosphere. But Francisco wasn’t so sure. “Their stability turns against them,” he explains. His computational research showed that when the compound was unreactive in the atmosphere, it could be transported to the stratosphere, where it would break down and damage the ozone shield.

“The chemical companies weren’t too happy” when he presented and published that research, Francisco recalls. Despite some external pressure to halt this work, university leadership was supportive, and Francisco believed in the validity of the research. He kept at it and other scientists began to validate his findings.

Years later, at an international conference where he was presenting on his ongoing chlorine chemistry research, he got a vote of confidence from a surprising source. A group of scientists from a company that produced chlorofluorocarbons approached him. “Joe, we knew you were right,” they said. “We were rooting for you 100 percent.” Though it took years, Francisco was glad to hear it. And, he says, the experience showed him how important it is to believe in yourself in the face of doubt.

His persistence in chlorofluorocarbon research opened new doors for his field. “It was an exciting time,” he says. “I’ve

been credited with showing the value of atmospheric computational chemistry as a new field, but I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. It was fun!”

Now, Francisco is decades into his career. But he’s still having fun, still making discoveries, and still championing education.

“Since I’ve been at Penn, I’ve been exploring new areas, like aerosol surfaces and cloud droplets,” he says. “How do those environments alter chemistry we previously thought was well-known? And we’ve been discovering stuff that is just incredible—a whole new set of chemical processes.”

These new discoveries relate to our health. “If you consider the air that we breathe, how do chemicals and pollutants interact with the surface of lung tissue?” he asks.

“Right now, we’re trying to understand the chemistry, and once we do, we can consider the broader implications for public health.”

Making these types of discoveries is thrilling for Francisco, who has dedicated his career to his curiosity. But they are also exciting for students who realize just how much more there is to learn. For Francisco, it is imperative that students have the tools to keep asking questions, questioning accepted wisdom, and pushing the boundaries of the discipline. It’s key for the future of chemistry and the future of our planet.

“We need to educate our students so they can be informed citizens,” he says. “That’s the power of educational institutions. I’m not saying we should tell students what to do, but we need to really help them to figure out how to make important decisions on their own with the information that’s available. For me, it is what our mission calls for.”

In 2019, Francisco participated in the University’s 1.5 Minute Climate Lecture series, focusing his talk on the origins of climate change and global warming, plus what we can learn from the past.

Brooke Sietinsons

In my experience, getting a student involved in research can be transformative. If a student tells me they find research exciting, I want to create as many opportunities as possible for them to explore their curiosity and make what is in the textbook come alive.

student tells me they find

The Other

Classical Studies Professors Kimberly Bowes and Campbell Grey reveal the world of Ancient Rome’s rural poor.

By Jane Carroll

The history of the ancient Roman world, as most people know it, is incomplete. It’s the story of the elites, representing only a small fraction of that vast civilization.

One day in 2007, while researching later Roman elites and aspects of the transition from a largely pagan world to a Christian one, Professor of Classical Studies Kimberly Bowes had a “Paul on the road to Damascus” moment. “A lot of the evidence for that transition is written by and about rich people,” she says, “and I don’t know how many times I found myself adding a footnote that read, ‘Obviously this only pertains to a small percent of the population.’”

As an archaeologist, Bowes realized she had the power to paint a more complete picture—that she could “go out and find the other 90 percent” if she wanted to.

She embarked on a six-year field study in southern Tuscany, which revealed that the rural poor in that region were active participants in shaping the Roman economy during its transition from the Republic to the rise of the Roman Empire—from roughly the first century B.C.E. through the first century C.E. Bowes’s two-volume fieldwork report, The Roman Peasant Project 2009–2015: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor, was published by Penn Press in 2021. It won the 2023 Anna Marguerite McCann Award for Fieldwork Reports from the Archaeological Institute of America.

traCking the rural poor

Uncovering material evidence of everyday ancient Romans presented big challenges. “No one had ever gone out and tried to systematically study poor people in the rural landscape before,” Bowes says. “We mostly know about them from what’s called field survey, which is when archaeologists walk along plowed fields and pick up and map ceramics found on the surface, assuming they relate in some way to buried remains beneath the ground. The smallest and poorest of those ‘surface scatters,’ as they’re called, were assumed to be where rural peasants lived, but no one had ever bothered to go and actually dig up a bunch of those to see if that was true.”

Brooke Sietinsons

Bowes, who served as director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014 to 2017, says there also had been a question of whether this type of exploration would uncover anything, because it was assumed that poor people “have no stuff.” She and two Italian colleagues formed what they called the Roman Peasant Project, soon to include her fellow Professor of Classical Studies Campbell Grey, who joined the research team as co-director.

Bowes and Grey first met as graduate students. Grey, who studies the social history of non-elites and had a longstanding interest in the lifeways of peasants, was eager to sign on to help tell their story. “If you’re only talking about a tiny slice of the population of the ancient world,” he says, “that doesn’t seem like an authentic study of a society.”

Bowes and her team discovered that these rural people used small utilitarian structures in different locations for various tasks and activities—little satellite spaces that they traveled between. These are some of the structures that the team “accidentally” excavated when looking for houses.

“What actually happened was that all of the assumptions that we had turned out pretty much to be wrong,” Grey says. “For me, this was the most exciting thing about the whole project. We embraced and celebrated the mistakes and figured out how to improve on those mistakes.”

The advantage of this mobile lifestyle was that it enabled Roman peasants of the period to make maximum and efficient use of the highly variable Mediterranean landscape.

Challenges and disCoveries

To grow different crops in different places, peasants took advantage of local resources. They pooled labor to build infrastructure such as olive presses, which were only used for a few months of the year. In one instance, the researchers excavated a combination olive and grape press. They determined that the press was shared by studying pollen and comparing plants they knew had been grown near the site with the remains of crops brought to the site.

As the research team—which also included Penn undergraduate and graduate students—began to excavate, they found remains of small stone structures, initially assumed to be houses. “We thought that we should dig the smallest, poorest things we could find,” Bowes says. “Well, they turned out to be pigsties and sheds and drains, not people’s houses—which we later learned were far bigger and richer from an archaeological perspective than we had imagined.”

“Tuscany has the same micro regionality as many other parts of the Mediterranean,” says Bowes. “If you’re a farmer and want to exploit that, it’s absolutely mandatory that you have a piece of land here and a piece of land there so you can use those different types of soil and hydrology and topography, so that you can grow different things at different times of the year.” She adds, “Historically, there have been many moments and economies where it has been to people’s great advantage to move around, not necessarily to the point of being nomadic, but nonetheless moving around to their advantage.”

Pollen settles into the soil, becoming part of the archaeological record, and Bowes says it’s only relatively recently that archaeologists have been able to extract and study it under a microscope. Botanists have developed a kind of field guide to pollen that helps identify the plant species that produced it. “If you pull out pollen from excavated archaeological strata, and you can date that stratum to 30 years, you can date your pollen to 30 years—and by archaeological standards 30 years is amazingly good,” says Bowes.

Archaeology is one of the most interdisciplinary of the humanistic sciences, and the varied perspectives of scholars from different backgrounds can create a more complete picture of a research topic, but it can also be challenging to communicate across disciplines. For example, Grey

What actually happened was that all of the assumptions turned out pretty much to be wrong. For me, this was the most exciting thing about the whole project.

Bowes (right) talks with local farmers, who kindly gave permission to excavate on their land and shared intimate knowledge of the micro-regions they farm today.

(L) Campbell Grey, Professor of Classical Studies, and Kimberly Bowes, Professor of Classical Studies

The Roman Peasant Project

played a key role in determining how rural people physically moved across the landscape, but first he had to learn how to communicate with a geo-archaeologist on the team named Antonia Arnoldus.

“We drove around in her little Fiat Panda all over the Tuscan countryside, trying to figure out how to talk to one another,” says Grey. “It was clear that there were a lot of important conversations to have, but we didn’t have a common vocabulary.” Arnoldus was using “land unit mapping,” evaluating the land by a set of criteria that determined whether it was arable, suitable for pasture, what the slope and elevation was, and other physical characteristics.

“And I’d be like, ‘Well, what are people doing here?’” Grey says. “‘How are they making their decisions about how to farm this, and what if the rich guy over there is not allowing them to do this because he owns the land?’ She would look at me as if I had two heads, but the problem was that

I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say either. I was in agency and people, and she was in landscape and place.”

Inspired in part by this experience, and with a growing interest in environmental history and disaster studies, Grey decided to enroll in Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies program, where he spent three semesters learning how to talk to geologists, environmental geochemists, and paleo-climatologists.

In addition to the challenge of communicating across disciplines, there were technological limitations. A commonly used computer mapping program, GIS (geographical information systems), revealed its shortcomings when the team generated a map to show how people could travel to and from a certain central location. “The problem was that it looks great on the map, and then you go to the landscape and you see a vertical slope,” says Grey. “There’s no way that anybody is ever going to walk up that slope, because the effort cost is too high.”

The computer program was telling the team something different, that there were regions only imperfectly connected to one another, he says, and that realization pushed the team to think further and ask new questions.

Several of the sites showed evidence of attempts to manage water and prevent flooding. Says Grey, “I think that asking questions about how marginalized populations went about living their lives, asking questions about how people might effectively or not effectively engage with the world around them, about how people respond to seasonal climatic and environmental changes, perturbations, and disasters, are also urgent questions in our contemporary world.”

There were also happy surprises. One unwritten law of archaeology, according to Bowes, is that often the best finds come on the final day of a dig. This happened as the team sought the remains of a particular peasant village. “We’d been digging there for a month,” says Bowes, “and on

Aerial view of a worksite at San Martino in Italy. The Roman Peasant Project originally identified this as a house until pollen analysis revealed evidence of animal urine and feces and fodder plants, suggesting it was a short-term animal stall and work hut.

The Roman Peasant Project

the last day, we found this extraordinary stash of beautiful terra sigillata plates (a type of ancient Roman red pottery with a glossy surface) all stacked one on top of the other where they had fallen, when apparently the kiln that they had just come out of had burned down.”

The presence of pottery kilns is another sign of shared labor and points to the fact that rural people produced and sold goods and did not rely solely on farming for their survival.

‘a hustle eConomy’

Bowes’s current project expands on this point, both geographically and chronologically. She is looking at farmers and urban dwellers in Britain, France, and Egypt from the end of the Roman Republic to about the third century C.E.

“I’m trying to extend those questions to urban working people and people outside of Italy,” she says. “I’m writing an economic history of the non-elites that takes on aspects of working people’s experiences, from wages to agriculture to credit and savings to consumption—all the boxes that economic historians like to tick, and using all the extraordinary evidence that exists now to tell new stories about these people’s economic lives. It’s a recognition of what I call a hustle economy. These are people who are not situated in one set of roles. They are consuming a lot and have multiple income streams, which they’re juggling all at the same time in remarkably sophisticated ways, but at extremely small scale.”

One source of data for Bowes’s work is Egyptian papyri, where she found records of payments to agricultural workers, credit accounts, and spending. By studying these records “sideways,” she could see that working for a wealthy landlord, for example, might be only one piece of a bigger income portfolio for a peasant. And she has been struck by parallels in today’s gig economy.

“It’s unbelievable the similarities of people who piece together an economic livelihood from multiple roles instead of simply doing one thing in a world which

The Roman Peasant

Project

is highly monetized,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that they’re any less at risk of falling into serious poverty, but they push back against that risk by doing more things, just like the gig worker does today.”

telling new stories

The findings that the Roman Peasant Project produced, through eight excavations, represent a volatile period in Roman history and paint a new picture of the rural poor and their place in that history.

“This ought to explode for us the idea that peasants didn’t play a role in that critical moment in Roman history in which we see the rise of cities, the increase in long-distance trade, the growing use of money, the development of markets,” Bowes says. “Because we were able to date these sites pretty tightly, we can see their role in the expansion of Roman rule—all the big things going on in their environment. In fact, there are more peasants doing these things than there are the rich guys who we assumed had been the protagonists of all these developments. It means we have to write peasants back into our histories as agents in these processes.”

This research also shows the ways in which Roman peasants impacted the landscape. “From my perspective, it’s

pretty clear that they’re taking maximum advantage of their landscape and constantly shaping and manipulating that environment to their own ends,” Bowes says. “This is completely the opposite of the idea of peasants that we have inherited through at least 50 to 100 years of archaeological work, in which we assumed they’re static. They aren’t risk takers. They just sit there and take whatever the weather gives them.”

cities began to grow, providing a market for what the rural people produced. The people she studied represent an increasing experience of a larger world. “Our peasants are sometimes drinking wine from Palestine in our later period, despite the fact that they are growing their own wine,” she says. “They’re buying fish sauce from Spain. These are people who are actively engaged in the same big and small networks that are particular to this moment in Roman history.”

Grey’s next project is a book about managing uncertainty, and he says people in antiquity learned to live with the unpredictability of nature by acknowledging that they couldn’t control the world around them. “You come up with pragmatic, economic, cultural, social, intellectual strategies for managing risk and uncertainty,” he says. “And I think that those strategies are, in many ways, more effective than ours, in our modern world, pretending that we can harness the world to our wills and desires.”

Bowes and Grey see a growing interest among archaeologists, classicists, and historians in studying poorer people. It can be a hard sell, Grey notes—the difference between finding “a bunch of really interesting dirt versus, ‘Look at this amazing urban temple.’” But they are hopeful that the collective scholarly discourse is moving in their direction.

Bowes notes that the manipulation and micromanagement of the Tuscan landscape only started to happen as

“The inequalities and growing poverty in our own world have made us wake up and realize that we have left the 90 percent out of most of our histories,” says Bowes. “That’s particularly true for the ancient world, I think in part, because it’s extremely difficult to recover these people. But more and more graduate students are coming to us wanting to work on enslaved people, peasants, the poor, people who haven’t been written into our histories as much as they should have been. I will say that classical studies, and particularly this department, have long tried to write women back into ancient history. And now I think we’re broadening the pool of the people we realize have been left out, and that is shifting, and it’s good news.”

The inequalities and growing poverty in our own world have made us wake up and realize that we have left the 90 percent out of most of our histories.

Artist’s reconstruction of the San Martino worksite.

ONLINE CONTENT

OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU

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.

ORIGIN

STORIES:

HEATHER LOVE (VIDEO)

The English professor and graduate chair talks about studying feminism and feminist theory, working at a furniture store after college, her love of literature, and her dedication to questions of LGBTQ justice.

2023 PENN GRAD TALKS (VIDEO)

In February, Penn Arts & Sciences’ graduate students representing the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the School’s professional masters’ programs presented TED-style talks about their research.

TOPPING OFF THE NEW HOME FOR ENERGY SCIENCE AT PENN (VIDEO)

On February 3, 2023, P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99, President Magill, and the Penn community celebrated the installation of the final beam of the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology.

Disability Seeing Differently

Scholars are trying to understand—and change—how the world works for people with disabilities.

By Susan Ahlborn

Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

Illustrations by Holly Stapleton

oday, I have no pain,” says Sara Purinton, a doctoral candidate in philosophy who deals with chronic pain in her arms and hands. “In certain ways, at least, I’m inhabiting an abled body.”

Millions of people wake up every day in bodies that are not “abled”—where mobility is impaired, sight or hearing is limited, where injury or disease has permanently altered function. In the United States, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created nearly four million disabled veterans. More than 25 million Americans say they have long COVID, defined by a wide range of health problems.

The post-pandemic world also seems awash in exhaustion, anxiety, and depression; in 2021, 5.4 million people took the Mental Health America online screening test, a nearly 500

percent increase over 2019. And the population is aging, which brings its own loss of abilities.

“One of the truisms of disability is that if we survive long enough, we’ll all be disabled,” says Heather Love, Professor of English. Love is a scholar of gender and sexuality studies and queer studies whose interests expanded to disability studies around 2010. In 2019 she herself suffered a stroke that left her legally blind and unable to drive a car or to read ordinary print. “It can seem like a niche field, but I think those tools are really helpful in navigating what it is to have a body and be mortal.”

The pandemic has brought questions about disability and access to the fore, raising issues such as whether some of its effects might be considered disabilities and what it’s like to not be able to get to school, work, or to see family and friends.

A growing academic movement is looking at how disability is seen in history, art, and the world. It’s focused not only on increasing knowledge but on making a positive difference. “I think at the most basic level, it’s really about advancing the welfare of people with disabilities,” says Love. “And that can include everything from having access to a broader array of culture to reducing stigma to legal inclusion. There are a lot of things that are necessary to make it possible to thrive.”

Penn Arts & Sciences scholars are examining the history of disability in the United States—one of discrimination and advocacy, technical advances and failed fixes, paranoia and persistence. They’re highlighting how disability is represented and how to appreciate and accommodate difference. And they’re thinking about how (or if) disability can be defined, and how that identification affects individuals.

Beth Linker History

The modern concept of disability is tied to the industrialized workplace and veteran welfare, says Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Associate Professor in the Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of History and Sociology of Science. During the Civil War, the government developed ratings so that soldiers got a payout depending on the severity of their disability, which was measured by their ability or inability to work.

It was also a time of discovery that caused some to think that science could solve everything. In Linker’s book, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America, she argues that reformers were emboldened to push new ways of “rebuilding” disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of the burden of pensions and easing the decision to enter the war. The approach had positive results, such as the development of physical therapy. But Linker says it was inspired by a belief that these conditions could be cured, “and that doesn’t happen.”

Other movements sought to prevent disability. In her most recent book, Slouch: Fearing the Disabled Body, Linker traces how, at the beginning of the 20th century, poor posture went from being merely bad form to a feared pathology. What followed was an epidemic-style approach to a nondisease: the development of standards and ways to monitor posture through testing, and the sale of preventive goods like chairs and underwear.

Linker’s family ran a nursing home; growing up, she says, “disability seemed more the norm to me than the exception.” She became a physical therapist, then took a course on medical ethics. She eventually was encouraged to apply to a doctorate program at Yale in the history of science and medicine and enter the emerging arena of disability studies.

The field had begun, along with race and gender studies, following the struggles for civil rights and recognition in the 1960s. Disabled people, many of whom were polio survivors, began advocating for access to education and transportation and the ability to live independently.

Exposés of terrible conditions at institutions like Pennhurst State School and Hospital (originally known as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic) also drove the fight, and intellectual disabilities became a fuller part of the movement. It continues to expand.

“Disability is the largest minority group,” Linker says. “It really encompasses a lot of different groups of people. And it’s sometimes hard to find common ground.”

After suffering a traumatic brain injury four years ago, Linker gained a more personal insight into the challenges of living with a disability in an ableist society. For 18 months she experienced vertigo and intractable headaches, leaving her largely unable to read, write, or use computers. “I have all the tools and connections. I have healthcare, I have an education. But I didn’t know who to go to, to get those accommodations, and it shouldn’t be that hard.”

“The medical system does very well at acute but it’s not so great with chronic long-term disabilities,” she continues.

“In my mind, that’s a healthcare system that is inherently ableist. I’d just like to bring to the fore more understanding of the degree to which ableism informs our culture, our politics, our society. We live in this world that only is conducive to a very small slice of biological variation.”

Disability is the largest minority group.

Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Associate Professor in the Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of History and Sociology of Science

Beyond Better Stories from the Pandemic

Jessica Martucci, Associate Director for Undergraduate Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor in

History and Sociology of Science, is a historian of medicine and bioethics. At the start of the pandemic, she and colleague Britt Dahlberg, an anthropology Ph.D., created the online site Beyond Better. The interdisciplinary, public project was designed to make space for listening, storytelling, art, nuance, and historical analysis.

“What we were seeing in the first half of 2020 was a complete erasure of disability perspectives in the ways the pandemic was being talked about and dealt with by the public health system, our political leaders, and the media,” says Martucci. There was even a discussion at one point about rationing ventilator use, she says, and disabled people were scared and angry. There were also growing reports of people who survived COVID but were not feeling better. “We recognize there is a space between getting better and dying,” says Martucci. “What does that look like? We wanted to do oral histories to capture these experiences and wanted the project to be digital because of the lockdowns.”

Looking forward, they’re developing ways to use oral history to intervene in public discourse around health issues. www.beyondbetter.org/home

Leah Samples Systems

A 2016 study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that most Americans regarded loss of eyesight as the worst condition that could befall them. “I was really interested in why blindness is set apart as a disability even into 2023,” says Leah Samples, a graduate student in history and sociology of science who is working to understand and amplify the experience of blind Americans.

As an AmeriCorps volunteer at an assistive technology center in Nashville, Tennessee, Samples saw the structural forces and issues with access—to healthcare, transportation, technologies—that shape life for many disabled Americans. She wanted to know why.

She interviewed 100 legally blind residents, asking them about their dayto-day life and what barriers they faced. “What really became clear to me was

just how much discrimination blind Americans face, really unique to the experience of being blind,” she says.

Samples is continuing to learn about the everyday experience of blind people, as her doctoral research has sent her into the archives of charitable organizations as well as state welfare departments. She sees a pattern.

“Millions of dollars have been spent to rehabilitate and aid blind adults who were considered worthy,” she says. “The blind themselves frequently would see federal and state legislation as the key to full economic and social citizenship. Yet time and again, each new piece of legislation would pass, and blind people would continue to find themselves in a bind.”

Leah Samples, doctoral candidate in history and sociology of science

Samples’ experience and research have shown her that technologies can both liberate and oppress.

Courtesy of Leah Samples

She cites Title X of the Social Security Act of 1935, which provided matching federal funds to states who gave benefits to their blind citizens. But the money came with restrictions; the recipient couldn’t hold a job that made more than a certain amount of money and had to see a stateapproved ophthalmologist, which often required an hourslong journey.

Additionally, new technologies were often hastily welcomed as magic-bullet solutions. After corneal transplants became widely available, for example, Indiana required that people be evaluated for the surgery in order to receive welfare.

Samples’ experience and research have shown her that technologies can both liberate and oppress, and she learned not to see anything as the ultimate fix. “It’s not that it’s wrong to want to cure,” she says. “The issue is when a singular technology or surgery takes over.”

Samples has mild cerebral palsy, and much of her childhood and adolescence were characterized by medical intervention, surgeries, and physical therapy appointments in a quest for minor improvements: “It really was a defining feature of my everyday experience, being enmeshed in these infrastructures.”

She’s planning another project that will be part history and part memoir, which she hopes will be a resource for families and organizations. “I’m going to show how trying to improve a body can be as exhausting and obsessive as a relentless search for a cure, that the systems we create have reallife consequences on people.”

Heather Love Di erence

Though minorities can be “hidden from history” in literature, says English Professor Heather Love, disability is everywhere. “Disability is actually very present in the history of literature, but it’s not represented realistically,” she says. “There’s no interest in the social fate of those characters. They’re used primarily as symbols—of evil, or frailty, or purity.”

In spring 2023, Love was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the category of literary criticism. Her interest in disability studies is related to her work in gender, sexuality, and queer studies.

“Disability studies allows us to recognize that human difference itself has value, rather than being something to be eliminated or managed,” says Love, whose books include Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory and Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, which

she co-edited with James English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English. “Shifting the frame changes how we make laws, how we educate citizens, how we make decisions about healthcare—all those things.”

It’s a message she tries to impart in her Disability Narratives course, which starts with students reading classic literature that features disabled characters. The texts then turn to memoirs and novels by people with disabilities. “Rather than thinking about this as a tragedy, we really think about it as a difference,” she says. “This material can be really challenging and transformative for students.”

People are often ready to judge other people’s lives as being not worth living or unsustainable, Love says. “But of course, things feel very different from the inside.

Disability studies allows us to recognize that human di erence itself has value.

Heather Love, Professor of English

I think what I try to teach in that class is that we’re unknown to each other in ways that can’t be overcome so easily.”

She struggles to balance the recognition of human variety with being realistic and pragmatic about the struggles people have. The intellectual history of disability studies began with a social model that argued that the world causes disability—for example, not having ramps and other accommodations so that wheelchair users could move freely through the world.

“It’s like the environment itself is disabling because it doesn’t make space for people with physical and other differences,” Love says. “And that’s such an important piece of the movement, and it’s behind many key policies. But there’s a more recent wave of work that argues that we also have to recognize that people deal with pain and impairment.”

In the classroom and her work, she’s able to explore nuances, she says, “but I’m often aware of the tensions between that academic approach and passing laws in Congress or protesting. I think there’s a place for all of these.”

Sara Purinton De nition

Who defines disability? “There are many medical definitions. There’s the legal sphere. There’s a social sphere. And these definitions obviously don’t perfectly track one another,” says Sara Purinton, a doctoral student in philosophy whose work focuses mainly on issues related to ethics, agency, and disability. “Deciding who should have the authority to define disability is complicated.”

Ultimately, though, one individual must move through the different spheres. “So, what happens when these contexts give different answers as to whether you count or not?” Purinton asks. “What’s unifying, if anything, all these various things that we call disabilities?”

Around the time Purinton started graduate school, she began experiencing chronic pain in her arms that left her unable to perform fine motor movements. She was shuffled among specialists and received a litany of different diagnoses. “I remember very distinctly this one doctor who was like, ‘Well, if it’s the fine motor movements that are causing the problem, just stop writing and typing.’”

She became interested in conditions such as long COVID and fibromyalgia, which are different from the common conception of disabilities: that they’re easy to identify, stable, and permanent.

Purinton has written about how conditions like chronic pain or illness can involve drastic fluctuations in what someone can do over time. “This kind of instability can lead to a distinctive challenge for how you think of yourself,” she says. “Part of who we are involves our goals, our aspirations, our commitments. But with a lot of these conditions, your future is very uncertain.”

It also leads to people who are uncertain whether they are disabled. Beyond that, some who see themselves as disabled will still not identify themselves that way to others, for many reasons.

“The fewer people that disclose, the more likely we’re just going to continue on with the same stereotypes,” Purinton

says. “But it’s also hard to put that on the individuals who are subject to a lot of the stigma, to have to do this self-disclosure of something that can be very personal.”

Philosophy can help with this problem of definition, says Purinton, “because one thing philosophy is good at is clarifying our concepts. But historically philosophy

hasn’t been too good on questions of disability. The prevailing view from the last 2,000 years of what it means to be a human makes a lot of ableist assumptions, like thinking that the mark of the human is a certain kind of reasoning or cognitive ability. What happens if those abilities are impaired? What does it mean to be human?”

Beyond that, her goal is to help people make sense of their own personal challenges. “Disabled people face many material challenges,” she says. “But disability also brings with it more subjective, existential issues about how to think of yourself. I’m especially interested in how these two sources of difficulty intersect, and how we might resolve any tensions between them.”

Sara Purinton, doctoral candidate in philosophy

Disability also brings with it more subjective, existential issues about how to think of yourself.

INCARCERATION AND

AT THE INTERSECTION OF Medical sociologist Jason Schnittker explores the paradox of healthcare and prison.

By Matt Gelb

Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha

When Jason Schnittker published a study about the long-term effects of incarceration on health in 2007, he had not veered far from his expertise. Schnittker, a sociology professor, had devoted most of his research to mental health and the inequalities that stem from socioeconomic status, race, and gender.

“So, the incarceration piece was at the intersection of all those,” Schnittker says. “It hit me at that time that I was working on it.”

His first paper on this topic, co-authored with a Penn undergraduate student, discovered a paradox that has since driven Schnittker’s work. He could not know that 15 years after that paper, this journey would bring him to Copenhagen to dissect trends among Danish prisoners.

Medical sociologists had mostly ignored the health effects of incarceration. Using data that followed incarcerated people over time, Schnittker found that prisoners reported their health improved while serving

their sentences but, once they were released, it deteriorated relative to comparable people. Although prisons are designed for punishment, they are required by law to provide healthcare.

“We thought that was a pretty provocative result,” Schnittker says. “It left open a lot to be explained.”

He partnered with two sociology professors from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota to write Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The book was published this past September. Oxford University Press labeled it “the first comprehensive and empirical book focused on the connection between incarceration and health.” The policies that drove mass incarceration were shifting, and the three sociologists concluded that rehabilitation in a correctional facility should not be restrictive or reactive. It should improve and restore.

This, they said, could reduce the cost to society once someone is released. Research for the book began in 2009, and between that time and the book’s 2022 release,

policymakers across the country had reassessed the place of prisons in American society. Schnittker and his coauthors captured the changing trends.

“It evolved in an unusual way,” Schnittker says. “We initially thought of it as an unusual stress. A trauma. These lasting impacts. Then, there is a sea change in the policy environment and the discussion around incarceration. We just followed the lead on it.”

That brought Schnittker to Denmark the summer before the book was published. He worked with researchers at the ROCKWOOL Foundation, analyzing data that captured the mental-health effects upon prisoners’ release. The criminal justice system is very different there, but Schnittker saw similarities in the trends.

Fifteen years after wondering why medical sociology had neglected health in prisons, here he was uncovering another layer to his research. “It was an intellectually demanding project,” says Schnittker. “It pulled me out of my comfort zone in many ways. That’s been rewarding.”

Exploring the Paradox

When it comes to criminal justice in the United States, Schnittker says, there are certain constraints on the imagination. Underlying everything is a set of assumptions about the purpose of prisons: incapacitate and punish—or rehabilitate. His research reinforced a deep connection between incarceration and health.

“Yet for all the evidence tying the two institutions together,” he writes, “policymakers and the public fail to grapple with a central fact: that prisons are squarely in the business of providing healthcare.”

By the time Schnittker and his coauthors (Michael Massoglia and Christopher Uggen) had published their book, there were larger conversations happening about how this country imprisons people.

Some were motivated by calls for racial justice, others driven by the rising costs associated with the incarceration of more people than any other nation in the world. The pandemic forced a review of everything, and one immediate byproduct was a reduction in the prison population.

“It’s an interesting time in the sense there is a real reform push,” Schnittker says. “There are people thinking about this seriously. It cuts across party lines. People recognize it’s just not working. It’s a time when you need not be cynical. People are actually listening and trying to figure these things out. There have been states that have decarcerated.”

The prison may have a smaller footprint on American society moving forward, and Massoglia, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin, says it’s a chance to consider a better post-release protocol for inmates. “Where could we do better?” Massoglia says. “There are not a lot of places we could do better, with more bang for your buck and less public opposition than basic medical care.” The risk factors for going to prison, Schnittker and his coauthors found, are quite similar to those for bad health.

Parolees are often asked about their living situation and job status as they reenter society.

“And it wouldn’t be that hard,” Massoglia says, “to work in something like, ‘Did you see your doctor? Are you in communicative therapy?’”

The authors found inmates’ physical health often improved while in prison, but mental-health issues were exacerbated. There is a certain stigma and stress associated with a criminal record, with a distrust of institutions layered on top. More therapy while imprisoned and a more direct transition to health providers once released could reduce the risk of reoffending. A recent study, Schnittker says, investigated states that had expanded Medicaid and found declining rates of rearrest.

A 1976 Supreme Court ruling guaranteed healthcare to inmates, but in the decades since, it’s been hard for prisons to disentangle their criminal justice mandate with this mandate of providing care.

“What we’re advocating for is expanding it a little more,” says Schnittker. “Thinking about the intersection of health and criminal justice and reoffending and putting it broader than ‘avoiding cruel and unusual punishment.’ Getting people to a position where they can reintegrate and they’re not going to come back to that prison. They can find that job. They can be a supportive spouse or father or mother.”

Massoglia credits Schnittker with shaping the larger ideas that tie together these complex systems. “Our work has helped us see that prison has impacts on all of us,” Massoglia says, “even those who don’t go to prison.” It affects community health. And, for Schnittker, this project tapped into issues he had grappled with since graduate school. Fitting into society. The institutions that determine our health. The intersection of mental, physical, and behavioral health.

It made for compelling research at a time when the discourse surrounding incarceration has shifted.

“Even if you don’t have special sympathies for folks who are incarcerated, people do realize that poor health undermines a lot,” Schnittker says. “They think about prisons primarily as a form of punishment and custody. But they’re also thinking that this is making things worse for them

Policymakers and the public fail to grapple with a central fact: that prisons are squarely in the business of providing healthcare.

when they are released. They’ve paid their debt to society. Now you need to get back on your feet and you’re in poor health. That would be hard for me. It would be hard for them. People are thinking about health in a more expansive way.”

And Schnittker forecasted it.

“He sees things just a little bit before other people do,” says Massoglia, “and certainly the field has been moved forward because of that.”

A Research Thread Without End

Two years ago, Shubha Vasisht, C’23, took Schnittker’s Medical Sociology class. “That really started my own passion for the field,” says Vasisht, a computational biology major. She declared a minor in medical sociology. Then she became a teaching assistant for Schnittker, and when she was applying for medical school, she asked him to write her a recommendation letter. Schnittker, a professor at Penn since 2001, agreed. But he wanted to interview her first.

“He really tried to delve into why I’m interested in certain things,” Vasisht says. “He tried to understand it himself to get a better perspective of me as a student. His ability to get to know his students well—to be able to better meet them where they are—is something that really stands out to me about him as a professor and as a mentor.”

In Schnittker’s teaching, Vasisht says, students recognize how adept he is at making complex ideas accessible. Schnittker’s research is typically a solo effort. He authored a book in 2017 on the classification and treatment of psychiatric disorders and another book in 2021 on anxiety.

But, as his own studies about health and prisons intensified, he realized he needed different perspectives.

CHANGING THE EQUATION FOR THE INCARCERATED

As an undergraduate, Mona Merling heard all types of inspirational stories from her Bard College professors teaching classes at prisons. Some incarcerated students were mathematics majors working toward a senior thesis—just like her—and this stuck with Merling as her career progressed in higher education.

He cold-called Uggen—who became one of his coauthors—with no idea where the initial inquiry could lead. “Here was a topic where it just taps into so many different things that I felt as an academic, you had to be a little bit modest,” Schnittker says. He envisioned the book being the capstone, but he’s since pulled on new threads related to health and prisons. There was the trip to Denmark. Then Massoglia suggested a project tying together incarceration and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

“I was discovering these relationships,” says Schnittker. “I was looking at all this data. It felt surprising. It felt rewarding. It felt like I was uncovering something that I couldn’t have foreseen.”

A colleague, aware of Schnittker’s recent work, approached him with a new challenge. She was conducting research on those convicted of genocide in Rwanda and, as those criminals neared the end of their prison terms, they were willing to be interviewed. Schnittker could assist in studying their mental health before and after release.

What that project and the others he’s already done made Schnittker realize is that the intersection of health and prisons has no limits. He is hopeful his book can influence policy decisions as more and more states consider reforms. The time is appropriate for a meaningful conversation.

When she joined the Penn faculty as an assistant professor of mathematics five years ago and searched for area universities that o ered a program similar to Bard’s, she encountered some dead ends before discovering the Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI), founded in 2005 by some Princeton astrophysicists. PTI provides college credit courses—taught by graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and sta —to incarcerated students in New Jersey. “They immediately embraced me,” Merling says.

That initial inquiry has grown to include about 15 Penn graduate students who

have served as volunteer instructors for classes at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Merling has also designed a bachelor’s-level course incarcerated students can take. This work is another way Penn scholars from various disciplines have engaged in solving the problems associated with the e ects of incarceration.

Merling’s collaboration with PTI is supported, in part, by a Klein Family Social Justice grant, a Penn Arts & Sciences program that funds academic activities that use the arts and sciences to contribute to positive social change.

You’re making an investment in folks who are particularly disadvantaged and who run the risk of falling through the cracks of society. This is a case where it’s an investment that reverberates more than you might think.

“Most of the data suggest that in the long term, a spell of incarceration is bad for your health,” Schnittker says. “It doesn’t have to be bad for your health. There are changes we can make to prisons themselves, but also the environment outside of prisons that can eliminate that relationship. That’s good for everybody. Obviously, it’s good for the folks who are incarcerated. But it’s good for communities. It’s good for families.

“You’re making an investment in folks who are particularly disadvantaged and who run the risk of falling through the cracks of society,” Schnittker adds. “This is a case where it’s an investment that reverberates more than you might think.”

For one medical sociologist, it’s a topic he’s pursuing deeper than he ever expected.

Her class is among the first STEM o erings to incarcerated students in New Jersey.

“They’re a lot more mature than any students we’ve ever had, and a lot more engaged,” says Merling. “They have to wait on a waitlist, sometimes for years, to get into these classes. Some of them have not done any advanced math. So, I think they really appreciate this opportunity.”

At first, Merling thought she’d teach a straightforward math class—nonEuclidean geometry, or something like that. Then, Merling paired with Hannah

Schwartz, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, to come up with something better aligned with criminal justice— the only B.A. degree o ered in New Jersey prisons.

“Hannah knew about this book about famous court cases that misused math,” Merling says. “So, it’s a math class. But it also has a criminal justice aspect to it.” She adds that the students are “excited to see these applications and connections that are, of course, very relevant to them.”

The class has 11 students and meets once a week for two-and-a-half hours.

Merling’s teaching team includes Ellen Urheim, a lecturer in the Penn math department, and two Penn graduate students, Rebecca Fishman and Deependra Singh. Merling’s bachelor’s-level class is o ered through Rutgers University.

She hopes to expand Penn’s involvement in the program. “It’s great that we have math graduate students and math faculty involved because we’re really excited about math,” Merling says. “And we love teaching math. I think it’s easy to get other people excited.”

Brooke Sietinsons

Jason Schnittker, Professor of Sociology

Being Social The Science of

By Loraine Terrell

Illustrations by Kingsley Nebechi

March 2020 marked the beginning of a sweeping, uncontrolled experiment. Across the country, millions of people attended school and did their jobs from home, minimized their interactions in the world, and conscribed their social activities throughout months of COVID quarantine. The experience left many of us pondering the power of connection and the impact of its absence.

Today, from the relative normality of 2023, we collectively continue to process the disruptions of quarantine through books, articles, and podcasts, as well as scientific research, probing our social nature. What do we miss when we can’t be together in person? What do we need from other people, and from our communities? What’s the value of being social?

On February 1, 2023, five faculty associated with MindCORE shared their observations on this theme with an audience of more than 150 alums at Slate NYC. MindCORE, or the Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education, is a Penn

Arts & Sciences hub for researchers across the University studying human intelligence and behavior.

Panelists delivered short talks around the theme of sociality from the perspectives of their own research, and the consensus was clear: We are fundamentally social animals, from the wiring of our brains to the structure of our social networks. Connections are critical not just to our happiness but to our survival.

As Michael Platt, the evening’s first speaker and the James S. Riepe University Professor, put it, “People who have more friends or deeper friendships live longer, healthier, happier lives, and they make more money. And the flip side is true: Chronic loneliness is more devastating to your health and well-being than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”

What follows are observations from the evening’s presenters, sharing what their research has to say about the nature of connection and its importance to us. Videos of each talk can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/pennsas/bentalksnyc2023.

Five Penn Arts & Sciences researchers explain why connections are critical not just to human happiness but also to our survival.

As Michael Platt observes, social connections have an indisputable impact on our capacity to thrive. The bigger mystery is the underlying mechanism, or “how the social environment gets under our skin to a ect our health, wellness, and well-being.”

A professor of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing with appointments in Penn Arts & Sciences, Wharton, and the Perelman School of Medicine, Platt examines questions ranging from how people make decisions, explore, learn, and form connections to how to use new knowledge about the brain’s mechanisms to improve health and well-being and maximize human potential.

“Our brains are wired to connect,” says Platt—and he means this literally. Structures in the brain, collectively described as the “social brain network,” work to manage our moment-to-moment interactions with other people. He notes that in individuals who have more friends, the social brain network is larger—a finding documented in an April 2022 Science Advances paper involving rhesus macaques. This study looked at a two-pronged brain circuit in macaques that functions identically in both the monkeys and humans to govern empathy and relationships.

Platt notes that humans aren’t unique in having a social brain. What does make us unique, in his estimation, is that the sociality dial in humans is “turned up to 11.” But some questions are di cult to study directly in humans, and so, given how similar the human brain and genome are to that of monkeys, they are a valuable model for understanding human behavior.

This is why Platt and his colleagues have spent the past 17 years studying a population of about 1,700 rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, an island o the coast of Puerto Rico. The team had been documenting the monkeys’ behavior, social connections, genetics, biology, and brains for years. Then came Hurricane Maria, a natural disaster that completely altered the monkeys’ habitat.

“what’s miraculous is, they’ve sustained this for five years … and we see no signs of letting up.”

The physiological stresses of the event clearly accelerated aging in many of the monkeys. Following the hurricane, the animals also formed closer social connections. What the researchers saw is that “the monkeys who actually managed to make more friends were more likely to survive, and their babies were more likely to survive,” says Platt. “The survival value of being social was made very clear in the aftermath of Maria.”

Platt says that humans share this tendency to seek connection in reaction to disasters. But with the monkeys, he says,

“The word psychopath never fails to elicit a reaction,” asserts Rebecca Waller. It is, she explains, a concept often framed by its extremes, real and fictional—from Je rey Dahmer to Hannibal Lecter.

As Waller sees it, to better understand ourselves as social beings, it’s valuable to come at the problem from the opposite angle: understanding the antisocial among us. An assistant professor of psychology who studies the developmental influences on social behavior, she has a particular interest in antisocial behaviors like aggression and callousness.

Waller defines psychopaths as “fundamentally antisocial people who are characterized by this lack of empathy, a lack of guilt, and who are able to lie, and cheat, and manipulate other people to get what they want, even at great cost to other people.” These traits can play out in the violence and crime frequently associated with psychopathy. But they can also play out in much more mundane ways, “in people we interact with who are antagonistic, who are coercive, who are manipulative.” Some people, she notes,

Rebecca Waller On Being Antisocial

Michael Platt

Examining the Social Brain

People who have more friends or deeper friendships live longer, healthier, happier lives, and they make more money. And the flip side is true: Chronic loneliness is more devastating to your health and well-being than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

might even associate some advantages with psychopathic traits: for example, “the idea of a successful psychopath, someone who can perhaps leverage that fearlessness, that deceitfulness to get ahead in life, to get their company in a better position, maybe even their country.”

In her lab, Waller works to understand the continuum of psychopathic and antisocial traits and behaviors, considering all age groups. A major focus of her work is to identify what psychopathy looks like in young children, something she seeks to do by measuring personality, temperament, and behavioral characteristics that might eventually manifest as psychopathy in an adult. “We look at really early di culties children have with empathy, lack of guilt, and recognizing and responding to social and emotional cues from other people,” Waller explains. They also look at factors in the environment: home life, school life, and community.

“This work on being antisocial can tell us a lot about what it means to be social, to be cooperative, to be empathic,” she says. Another important aspect of her work is providing a basis for clinical interventions. “How can we use this,” she asks, “to, in a non-stigmatizing way, identify children much earlier, and direct services and intervention and prevention e orts so that we can reduce risk of harmful outcomes?” Such interventions can have broader impacts, she notes, addressing “the great costs of violence and crime at a societal level, as well as in our daily interpersonal interactions with other people.”

Coren Apicella Making Cooperation Go Viral

Associate Professor of Psychology Coren Apicella drew lessons about cooperation by experiencing Pandemic—the best-selling board game. By its design, the game requires players to work together to save

Brain Teaser, Crowd Pleaser

In February at Slate NYC, more than 150 Penn Arts & Sciences alums and friends gathered to socialize—and to learn about the science behind such connections. The event, the latest in the Ben Talks series, was hosted by Dhan Pai, W’83, PAR’12, PAR’15, of the Penn Arts & Sciences Board of Advisors, and Heena Pai, PAR’12, PAR’15, with the host committee.

The evening began with dinner, followed by five short talks on topics from the evolution of cooperative behavior to how we navigate our world. After the presentations, Joseph Kable, Professor of Psychology and director of the Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education, led a discussion and Q&A.

“The professors were so interesting, so eloquent,” says Manisha Manglani, C’01. “The topic was relevant for so many of us trying to navigate coming back to work full time, socializing with friends after years.”

Part of the discussion centered on the physical effects of being antisocial, which struck Ryan Weber, ENG’04, W’04. “To make sure you have those strong social connections is super important for not just your mental health, but your physical health as well.”

Slate NYC offers foosball and giant Jenga, pool and ping pong, along with plenty of places to relax and catch up. It made for a great backdrop to the evening, says Pravin Manglani, ENG’01, W’01. “We’re here in New York City in a very social setting with games and food and drinks, getting together to learn a little bit about the theory about being social.”

humanity, “revealing our vulnerabilities when we fail to cooperate,” she says, “but also showing us what we can achieve when we do cooperate. … We saw it in the real-life pandemic, too.”

According to Apicella, human cooperation is distinct from other animals. “In humans,” she says, “cooperation extends beyond our relatives. It extends beyond our friends to include strangers. And our cooperation can scale up from small groups to millions of people.”

Apicella’s work focuses on how biology and culture influence our social choices, including who we pick as a mate, what kind of economic decisions we make, and whether we cooperate or compete with one another. Her conclusions are drawn from work in a laboratory environment, as well as through fieldwork studying the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population in northern Tanzania.

Apicella says that the Hadza provide a window into the evolutionary origins of cooperation, and her observations of them suggest that this facet of human behavior may be better understood as the product of a social dynamic rather than as a stable personality trait.

The Hadza live in small, nomadic groups. As they move around and encounter others, new groups form and old ones disband. Apicella observed that an individual’s inclination to cooperate would change along with changes in the group—reflecting the group’s cultural norms. “Humans are an ultra-cultural species,” she explains. “We have adaptations for acquiring our beliefs, our values, our behaviors, our practices, our rituals—all sorts of things from the people around us. Culture is what determines who we cooperate with, how we cooperate, and to what extent we cooperate.”

To Apicella, these findings are good news. What this suggests, she argues, is “that we don’t have set limits on our levels of cooperation, that cooperation isn’t fixed, and that each of us can play a part in making the world a more cooperative place. Just by cooperating with the people around us, we can get cooperation to spread.”

Just by cooperating with the people around us, we can get cooperation to spread.

Typically, we understand evolution and natural selection in terms of a genetic inheritance passed on from parent to o spring. But “genes are not the only thing that are passed on,” notes Associate Professor of Biology Erol Akçay. “A lot of organisms like plants or animals pass on symbionts [organisms living in symbiosis with that individual] or microbiomes to their o spring.”

Akçay explores the evolution of complex social and biological organization, in contexts from plant-microbe mutualism to animal and human behavior. As a theoretical biologist, his work applies mathematical modeling, simulation, and analysis of existing data to explore a range of topics. His group considers such broad questions as how natural selection shapes the structure of social interactions, and why humans and other highly social animals cooperate, even when doing so o ers no direct benefit.

In humans, Akçay says, the non-genetic legacy includes cultural inheritance, “things that you hear from your parents, things that you hear from elders, things you hear from your peers, and that will determine your behavior.” And recent work by Akçay’s group has explored how social connections become a part of the non-genetic inheritance.

Akçay’s group started with 27 years’ worth of detailed data about hyenas that had been collected by zoologist Kay

Holekamp of Michigan State University. Hyenas are highly social animals that live in groups as large as 100 or more members; their society is hierarchical, where females are dominant. Holekamp’s fieldwork provided a wealth of information about the structure of the hyenas’ social networks. But Akçay wondered, what was the process through which these structures became established?

By combining Holekamp’s detailed individual-level data with a mathematical model Akçay and colleagues developed, they were able to document a close correlation between the social networks of a mother and her o spring. Furthermore, they were able to show that a hyena’s social network inheritance correlated with the mother’s rank: the higher her rank, the more closely her o spring’s social network would align with her own.

“This sort of social inheritance process— this social inheritance of connections— can actually explain a lot of the patterns that we see in animal social networks in nature,” Akçay says. “In fact, it also correlates with their survival.” Whether it’s the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, humans, or any other social species, the data draw a straight line between wellness and strong social connections.

A professor of psychology, Kable is also director of MindCORE. In recent work, he and colleagues have explored the processes that drive the decisions we make about other people, and in doing so, the researchers have shed some light on how sociality may change over the lifespan.

To evaluate how people make decisions about social connections, Kable’s team designed a study in which one group of subjects was given $10 and then had the option to either keep it or split it evenly with a subject from a second group. The first group of subjects would be photographed so that the second group could identify who was “fair”—those who split the $10 with them—and those who were not. The second group was then given a choice about whether to have an additional interaction with a person who they knew to be “unfair” or with a random individual. The selection subjects made, it turned out, correlated strongly with their age.

Study participants ranged in age from 18 to 80, and Kable says they found “really profound di erences” in social decision-making across age groups. “In the 18- to 21-year-olds,” he says, “they really remember the people who didn’t give them the $5, and really avoid them the next time they have a chance.” Subjects on the older end of the continuum were more likely to try another round with someone who was “unfair.”

Joseph Kable’s research focuses on how we make decisions, including the underlying neural mechanisms of choice.

As Kable sees it, the apparently more forgiving approach of the older participants may reflect a higher valuation of sociality. He explains, “Even if they think, ‘That person was unfair to me before,’ there seems to be a bias to say, ‘But I’m going to give them another shot. I’ll interact with that person rather than another random individual.’ What we’re seeing is that as people get older, they seem to recognize this wisdom of social connections, and try to give people, and those connections, a second chance.”

Erol Akçay

The Social Inheritance of Connections

Joseph Kable Giving Connections a Second Chance

Art

on e Ri r

Jonathan Katz, Associate Professor of Practice of History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, takes an art exhibition down the Amazon.

Photography courtesy of Jonathan Katz

his winter found Jonathan Katz floating on a raft down the Amazon River to visit Indigenous communities for an art exhibition.

It was all part of “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present,” a project led by Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies. The $5 million grant is part of Mellon’s Just Futures initiative. Dispossessions in the Americas aims to document territorial, embodied, linguistic, and cultural heritage dispossessions in the Americas and to recover histories and promote restorative justice.

Katz, Associate Professor of Practice of History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, has been using Mellon Funds to organize art exhibitions in Latin America on various themes. “One of the more interesting ones was in Peru, which looked specifically at the art of Indigenous communities of the Amazon, and Indigenous art-making,” he says.

Working with partners at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, who identified Indigenous artists, Katz produced the exhibition and endeavored to bring it to some of the people who inspired it. “It just seemed wrong to all concerned that an exhibition of Indigenous art would only be shown in the capital city,” he says. “So, we made a plan to take the project onto a raft and travel down the river to the communities that generated the work in the first place.”

Katz spent three days visiting Indigenous villages, accompanied by artists whose work was part of the Lima exhibition. The artists worked with community members to create art using available materials.

One readily available material, as it turned out, was cardboard. There are no recycling facilities in the Amazon, and everyday necessities often come in cardboard boxes. “As a result,” says Katz, “there are huge piles of cardboard that no one knows what to do with, and so we

brought along an artist who showed people how to construct sculpture out of cardboard.”

Other artists worked with natural materials such as wood or bark fiber. Katz wanted to make the point that formal artistic materials aren’t necessary to produce artwork. “There was one beautiful work in the Lima exhibition of an Indigenous dugout canoe that was painted in these extraordinary ways,” he says.

says the “intrinsic indigeneity” of the communities surrounding the Amazon has become fractured by national boundaries and varied national politics and policies.

“This project represents an attempt to forge a pan-Amazonian identity—which of course predated the arrival of the conquistadors—and to articulate it in terms of environmental necessity,” says Katz. He expects the journey will take about four months and will require a more substantial vessel suitable for dangerous stretches of the river. Environmental concerns have also prompted Katz’s team to rethink the fuel that powers its next boat.

For his next venture, Katz is in the process of raising funds for a pan-Amazon trip, beginning at the river’s headwaters and going all the way to the Atlantic, a journey that will cross many borders. He

“We decided we couldn’t do it with another gasoline-powered vessel. We are now working with a series of projects to develop a solar-paneled vessel that will be entirely emission-free in its movement down the Amazon. What we’ve come to understand,” Katz says, “is that Amazonian rights and larger planetary interests coincide.”

What we’ve come to understand is that Amazonian rights and larger planetary interests coincide.

(Top to bottom) The Indigenous community presents the Penn team with a board painting chronicling their visit; Katz (front) and other members of the Penn team on a dugout canoe used for transit between villages.

The art raft moored for lunch along a tributary to the Amazon.

Kids Judge! Neuroscience Fair Turns the Tables

Sixty-six third- and fourth-grade Philadelphia elementary school students came to campus in March for the Kids Judge! Neuroscience Fair. Held for the first time since 2019, Kids Judge! has Penn Arts & Sciences undergraduates from neuroscience fields design exhibits that demonstrate how the brain and nervous system function. The elementary students try out and judge the projects, in a flip-flop of a traditional science fair. This role reversal is designed to improve how the scientists communicate about their work and to engage young children in science.

Churchill, Marshall, and Thouron Scholars Selected

Awards support studies in the United Kingdom.

Physics major Sarah Kane, C’23, visual studies major Amy Krimm, C’23, and alum Carson Eckhard, C’21, who graduated with honors in history and English, have been named 2023 Marshall Scholars. Established by the British government, the Marshall Scholarship supports up to three years of graduate study for American students in any field at an institution in the United Kingdom. Kane, Krimm, and Eckhard are among just 40 Marshall Scholars for 2023, representing 32 U.S. institutions.

Mathematics major Ryan Jeong, C’23, and biophysics, biology, and philosophy major Arnav Lal, C’23, are among 16 students nationwide who have been selected to receive a Churchill Scholarship—considered one of the most prestigious and competitive international fellowships for American students planning graduate study in the United Kingdom—for a year of

research at the University of Cambridge. Jeong and Lal will receive full funding for a one-year master’s program at Churchill College at Cambridge.

Alisa Ghura, C’23; Shivani Nellore, C’23, W’23; Winston Peloso, C’23, G’25; Gabriella Rabito, C’23; Srinidhi Ramakrishna, C’22; Thomas Russell, C’23; Oliver Stern, C’23; and Elena Tisnovsky, C’23, have each received a 2023 Thouron Award to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom. Thouron Scholars receive tuition for up to two years, as well as travel and living stipends. Established in 1960 and supported with gifts from the late John Thouron and his wife, Esther du Pont Thouron, the Thouron Award is a graduate exchange program between Penn and U.K. universities that aims to bolster relationships between the countries.

Brooke Sietinsons

Comfort, Community, and “Geek Culture”

Joseph Earl Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in English, unpacks his difficult upbringing in an award-winning memoir.

An excerpt from Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which recognizes an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction. Thomas has also received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s currently working on a novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories called Leviathan Beach. —

KAREN BROOKS

The Storm of 1928

Brett Robert, Ph.D. candidate in history, uses a devastating hurricane to explore how race shapes life and death.

History Ph.D. candidate Brett Robert’s research on a 1928 Caribbean hurricane came about after a modern disaster: the 2017 Tubbs wildfire in Santa Rosa, California.

Robert, who lived in Santa Rosa for more than a decade and started his educational journey there, later moved to Penn in the fall of the wildfire to study Latin.

When the storm made landfall in Palm Beach County, thousands were killed, and the victims were disproportionately African Americans and Bahamians who lived near Lake Okeechobee and drowned. The flooded ground made proper burials impossible. White victims’ remains were identified and prepared for burial in nearby communities, but Black victims’ remains were initially burned and later interred in a mass grave.

This research is more important now than ever, as hurricanes powered by warmer oceans arise—especially in Florida, Robert says, where data about segregation and racial discrimination has become a political scapegoat.

— KRISTEN DE GROOT

Students on Heritage

Undergraduate Humanities Forum Fellows share research on “The World We Inherit.”

In his new memoir, Sink, doctoral candidate in English Joseph Earl Thomas chronicles his tumultuous childhood in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia, where he faced physical and verbal abuse, poverty, humiliation, and hunger. A February New York Times review called the book “an extraordinary memoir of a Black American boyhood.”

“Most of my life was filtered through ideals of masculinity in which physical prowess was the only kind of knowledge that was acceptable or would be tolerated,” Thomas says.

Comprising a series of vignettes told mostly with third-person narration, Sink captures Thomas’s daily pain and loneliness but also describes his ability to escape through “geek culture”—fantasy and virtual worlds like those in video games, Japanese anime, and the Pokémon franchise. During his coming-of-age in the late 1990s, these worlds provided Thomas with a safe haven, a sense of community, and the confidence he needed to grow and thrive.

“Every day I was coming home from class and just hitting F5 over and over on Facebook, trying to check in on friends to see if they were OK, to see if people needed anything, if I could send supplies,” he says. “That got me really thinking about disaster.”

Robert’s dissertation focuses on the September 1928 hurricane that killed thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless, examining its impacts across the Caribbean, from Guadalupe to Puerto Rico and into Florida. Studying natural disasters shows it is essential to ask questions about race’s effects on the way people live and die within their environments, he says.

“Even something like a hurricane—which affects all residents of an area and has no bias or ability to discriminate—produced different effects for different groups,” Robert says. “This was not because of how the hurricane behaved but because of systemic problems that propagated racial disparities in the affected regions.”

Before receiving an undergraduate research fellowship from the Wolf Humanities Center—Penn’s hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and programming—Roseline Gray, C’23, had little experience collaborating with scholars in the arts.

Working alongside peers from different disciplines is the biggest perk of being a Wolf Undergraduate Fellow, says Gray, who majored in international relations and Russian and East European Studies. Every year, these fellowships support

Joseph Earl Thomas

Drake Masters

Roseline Gray, C’23

Brooke Sietinsons

about a dozen students’ independent research projects spanning different subjects but rooted in one overarching theme, with the program culminating in a conference where the fellows present their studies. Before this year’s March 31 conference, “The World We Inherit,” students workshopped each other’s papers on the theme of “heritage.”

“Hearing how researchers in other areas pull from the humanities to build arguments about the visible impact of the past on the present brought fresh perspectives to the table and made a huge difference in the way my project turned out,” says Gray, who examined historical narratives tied to the Russian decision to invade Ukraine in 2022.

Julia Verkholantsev, Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies and director of this year’s forum, says “capacious” themes are chosen intentionally.

“It’s not about everyone’s projects fitting perfectly with the category,” she says. “It’s about making connections so that among their broad interests in the humanities, they find some intersection when they engage with each other.”

In addition to pursuing their research projects, fellows participate in events connected to the forum theme. Activities included a visit by visual artist Shahzia Sikander, whose work explores cultural identity and colonial and postcolonial histories; a tour of Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts; and a trip to the Penn Museum to learn about collecting and preserving archaeological finds and artifacts. —

KAREN BROOKS

2023 Penn Grad Talks

Graduate students give TED Talk-style presentations on a wide range of topics.

At the 2023 Penn Grad Talks, which took place in February, Penn Arts & Sciences’ graduate students presented TED-style talks about their research. The students, representing the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the School’s professional masters’ programs, were vying for $500 prizes.

The winner in the Professional Master’s category was Edward Johnson, who is completing a master’s degree in international studies in the Lauder Institute—a joint program of the Wharton School and Penn Arts & Sciences. His talk, “The Battle for Africa’s Sporting Heart: Can Basketball Overtake Football’s Popularity?” discussed the business of sports in Africa and outlined barriers limiting basketball’s popularity.

Amber Mackey, a Ph.D. student in American politics, took the social sciences prize for her talk, “Racial Policy and Agenda Instability: Measuring Legislative Attention to Race.” She focused on public policy’s relationship to race and ethnicity politics and how state policies address or omit race across policy domains.

In the humanities, the top prize went to Kyle West, a Ph.D. candidate in ancient history, for “Aging Virtuously: Cicero on Old Age, Disability, and Character.” West unpacked Cicero’s dialogues on aging and discussed both modern and ancient peoples’ views on the vulnerabilities of the human body.

Mark Giovinazzi, a Ph.D. student in physics and astronomy, won first prize in the natural sciences for explaining the recent boom in the discovery of exoplanets, or planets outside the solar system, in his presentation, “From Zero to Five Thousand: The Current Census of Exoplanets.”

This year’s Audience Choice winner was Valerie Averia, a master of applied positive psychology student in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies. Her talk, “Savoring the Shared Life: Strengthening Marriages Through Collaborative Legacy Writing,” examined how writing together to preserve life experiences can strengthen a couple’s relationship.

To watch all of the Penn Grad Talks presentations, visit vimeo.com/channels/penngradtalks.

At the seventh annual Penn Grad Talks, Arts & Sciences graduate students from a range of disciplines shared their expertise with viewers in person and online. Competition winners included (from left): Kyle West from the Ancient History program; Amber Mackey from political science; Mark Giovinazzi from physics and astronomy; Valerie Averia of the Applied Positive Psychology program; and Edward Johnson, an International Studies professional master’s student at the Lauder Institute.

Brooke Sietinsons

Black Voices on Confederate Monumentation

Olivia Haynie, C’24, and Justin Seward, C’25, spent last summer researching historical Black perspectives on Confederate monuments.

Hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to oppose a Confederate statue’s removal in 2017. Images showed the group marching with torches, waving Confederate flags, and later, the aftermath of the death of a counter-protester mowed down by a white supremacist in his car. Since then, other instances of Confederate monumentation have sparked ongoing debate.

The controversy surrounding these monuments is nothing new, say Olivia Haynie, C’24, and Justin Seward, C’25, explaining that although their voices have largely been marginalized, Black communities have been addressing the topic of Confederate monuments since shortly after the Civil War. Haynie and Seward spent last summer researching

Black opinions on Confederate monuments in more than 150 Black-owned or -operated newspapers.

The student researchers examined articles, news reports, images, cartoons, and advertisements catalogued from the online archives of the Library of Congress, ProQuest, newspapers.com, and the Digital NC database (a project of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center), from immediately after the Civil War until today. They found upticks in critical Black commentary on Confederate monumentation during specific periods like the post-reconstruction era, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement.

Seward, who is double majoring in sociology and religious studies, says the research reinforced that “Confederate

monuments are not just symbols of hatred and white supremacy; they are active players in it because they perpetuate white supremacy,” and noted similarities between today’s debates and those during the Civil Rights movement.

Haynie, a CAMRA Mellon fellow majoring in sociology with a minor in religious studies, is hopeful that “further investigation into how language places people within this issue—or removes them from it—could shed light on why the Confederate monument controversy has been drawn out over a century.” — KATELYN SILVA

Justin Seward, C’25, and Olivia Haynie, C’24

Alums Advise Students on Career Paths

College alums continue to help students investigate career possibilities through the College Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS), with events both virtual and on campus. Themes this semester have included entertainment and media; public health and healthcare consulting; and marketing and brand management. Alums share their stories and answer all sorts of student questions about how their liberal arts education has supported their careers.

PWA from Philly to San Francisco

Eight alums returned to campus for the spring Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) Roundtable, an opportunity for students to learn about the wide variety of career paths possible with a liberal arts degree and to build their networks. In April, PWA held its first satellite event in San Francisco, giving professionally engaged College alums in the area a chance to get together and network.

Ambassador Council Goes (Penn) Forward

Members of the Arts & Sciences

Ambassador Council were on hand for President Liz Magill’s Penn Forward event in Los Angeles this winter. Across the United States and in London, Penn Forward gave alums, parents, and friends the chance to meet Magill and connect with Penn and each other.

To learn more and get involved in alumni volunteer opportunities, contact Kathe Archibald, Director of Global Alumni Engagement, at kathea@sas.upenn.edu

Chris Farina

Brooke Sietinsons

Brooke Sietinsons

Brooke Sietinsons

David Hill

(Clockwise from top left) Students and mentors at the marketing event; alum mentors (from left) Kristy Willard, C’13, Dana McCurdy Hibbard, C’06, Catherine Clair Williams, C’08, and Basil Jackson, C’16; PWA Roundtables; (from left) Alix Rogers, C’07; A. Melissa Lopez, C’99, D’02, GED’02; Karen Murphy, C’96; Eliza Hart, C’92; and Abby Kortz, C’03, at the PWA by the Bay event; from left, Ambassador Council members Amanda Lewis, C’99, PJ Lewis, C’99, and Ted Fentin, C’95, with Penn Arts & Sciences Director of Global Alumni Engagement Kathe Archibald, second from right.

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog series that highlights College alums in their workplaces as they reflect on how and why their careers took shape.

To see more, visit www.sas.upenn.edu/at-work.

SONIE GUSEH OSAGIE, C’10 Senior Director of Strategy and Operations, CNBC

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

ENGLISH MAJOR, HISPANIC STUDIES MINOR

“I was always interested in journalism and media, but I didn’t realize how complex media organizations are and how there are so many different platforms for content and different ways to contribute to this industry.”

Courtesy of Sonie Guseh Osagie

Summer Reading: Michael Mann

Suggestions for your summer reading list from the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science.

BY SUSAN AHLBORN

Internationally recognized scientist and advocate Michael E. Mann is the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. His research focuses on climate science and climate change. He has received many honors and awards and is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, numerous op-eds and commentaries, and five books, including The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and The New Climate War. Here, he suggests five books for your summer reading.

THE BIG MYTH: HOW AMERICAN BUSINESS TAUGHT US TO LOATHE GOVERNMENT AND LOVE THE FREE MARKET, by Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway

The authors of the climate change denial exposé Merchants of Doubt now take on the dogma of free market ideology. I highly recommend this book because only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.

LIFE: A JOURNEY THROUGH SCIENCE AND POLITICS, by Paul R. Ehrlich

I recommend the book not only because Ehrlich is a good friend, but because his decadesold warnings about environmental threats— including the climate crisis—have proved so salient and prescient.

PARABLE

OF THE SOWER, by Octavia E. Butler

THIS

IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS: THE CYBERWEAPONS ARMS RACE, by Nicole

Perlroth

This account of the cyber arms trade edged out my own book (The New Climate War) to win the Financial Times’ 2021 book of the year. I recommend it because we cannot make progress on any of the great challenges we face—including the climate crisis—in a political economy of rampant disinformation.

My wife and daughter recommend Butler’s book about a minister’s daughter who loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape.

THE CLIMATE BOOK, by Greta Thunberg

Thunberg’s “essential handbook for changing the world” presents diverse insights from so many leading thinkers (and even yours truly).

Eric Sucar, University Communications

Three

Questions: Working in a Pharmacy During the Pandemic

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shivani Nellore, C’23, W’23, took a job as a pharmacy tech, learning a great deal about medications and humans in the process.

BY SUSAN AHLBORN ShivaniNe

In spring 2020, Shivani Nellore, C’23, W’23, was three-quarters of the way through her first year in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Life Sciences and Management (LSM) program when the University sent students home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in Great Falls, Virginia, Nellore kept up with her dual degree but was getting cabin fever and wanted to help during the pandemic. She took a job as a pharmacy technician at the local CVS.

As an LSM scholar, Nellore graduated this spring with two bachelor’s degrees, in biology from the College and in economics from Wharton. She conducted cancer research throughout her undergraduate career, was a business intern at the Lifespan Cancer Institute, and worked with Philadelphia high school students via the Educational Pipeline Program. As a Thouron Scholar, Nellore will pursue a master’s degree in radiobiology at the University of Oxford before going on to medical school.

We asked her about being on this particular front line during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO WORK AT A PHARMACY DURING A PANDEMIC?

I honestly was getting a little stir-crazy, but also, I want to be a physician and I wanted to help with the COVID efforts. All the hospitals in the area were closed to volunteers. The next option was a pharmacy, where I thought I could help with COVID testing.

I liked learning the technical stuff. In Virginia you have to be certified within nine months. Because I was also a fulltime student, it took me seven months to get the hours and prepare for the exam, which requires understanding all the different regulations. I had to learn about more than 200 drugs, what type of classifications there are, what they react against—basic knowledge, but it will help a lot in the future.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO WORK THERE DURING THE HEIGHT OF COVID-19?

I helped with COVID testing, and later, with intake when we gave the vaccines. That was on top of all of the other pharmacy tech duties: accurately inputting the prescriptions, dispensing drugs, working at the register, and conducting patient outreach calls. We would have days where, at the beginning of the shift, someone would say, “Thank

you so much for working during the pandemic.” And then on the same shift, we would have people screaming at us because we were unable to fill a medication in time.

I wasn’t too worried about getting COVID myself, but I was nervous for my parents and for my grandpa, who were high-risk. At that time, we didn’t have a vaccine and there were no good treatments, so it was nerve-wracking. It was surreal, now that I think back, the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, but also being a college student not knowing when you’re going back to campus.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN?

I really loved that job. I learned so much about multitasking because I was juggling so many things. I used to be impatient as a patient at the pharmacy; I know now how much back-end work there is.

The main thing I learned was how to comfort someone when there’s so much distance between you. I remember one patient came in and he wanted a COVID test. He needed it to fly somewhere because his sister had died, but we had run out of tests. That person’s grieving. How do you offer comfort? Especially with glass between you. You learn a lot about talking to people and making sure they understand that you genuinely empathize with them, no matter what walk of life they come from. How do you at least try to make their day a little bit brighter?

The main thing I learned was how to comfort someone when there’s so much distance between you.

The glacial valley in Greenland looks idyllic—peaks loom in the background and a picturesque river winds into the distance, its ultimate endpoint left to the imagination. Biogeochemist Jon Hawkings and colleagues spent a month in 2018 conducting fieldwork in this natural laboratory. “The sediment-rich river is the Isortoq River, which is fed by a catchment of the Greenland Ice Sheet called Isunnguata Sermia,” says Hawkings, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

“We camped near this river, taking samples for geochemical analyses.” From the icy glacial meltwater, Hawkings is trying to better grasp what he calls the cycling of elements through the Earth system. Such an understanding, he says, could reveal not only what role glaciers play today in downstream ecosystems but also how they have shaped the planet’s evolution. The work has taken Hawkings to some of the globe’s farthest reaches, from Patagonia and the Himalayas to remote outposts of the Arctic.

Jon Hawkings

University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences

3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284

Ben Connect matches College alums and students for conversation and mentoring: benconnect.sas.upenn.edu