News
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April 21, 2020
How Philly’s Neighborhoods Can Help Us Understand PandemicsIn fact, Philadelphia and other modern cities could not have survived or continued to grow without innovations like sewers and water filtration systems, which allowed urban density to occur safely. Around the same time that city officials were enlarging Fairmount Park, scientists were beginning to understand that illnesses like typhoid and cholera were caused by microorganisms. The field of public health started shifting toward developing immunizations and medical treatments rather than improving urban infrastructure. Yet even now, medicine alone still cannot protect everyone from disease outbreaks, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates.
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April 21, 2020
Weitzman School’s Megan Ryerson Invites Students to Remotely Join in Her Family’s ActivitiesProfessor Megan Ryerson in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design connects with her students by inviting them, remotely, to dinners and movies with her family. “I immediately felt this loss of connection: in the classroom, in seminars, in casual lunches. What is a world-class university if it is not people exchanging ideas together in person, proximate to that electricity and synergy?” Ryerson says. “Penn is not just about delivering an education; it is an experience.” Describing herself as “relentlessly positive,” she tried to think of how to connect with her students and have them connect with each other.
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April 16, 2020
Professor Emily Wilson Named 2020 Guggenheim FellowUniversity of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson in the School of Arts and Sciences has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the humanities category for her translations of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy.
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April 16, 2020
Meet the Penn Students Recreating Campus in MinecraftWith dozens of volunteers, a group of students are building a digital version of campus in the popular video game. “We currently have lots of parts of campus done, but still some buildings [like high rises and frat houses] need finishing. My friend and I are going to be working on the Annenberg Center and the whole plaza...But spectacular buildings like Fisher Fine Arts, Van Pelt-Dietrich, Huntsman Hall, those are all already basically done—the exteriors.”
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April 16, 2020
President’s Engagement and Innovation Prize Winners Announced, Including Two Arts and Design-Related ProjectsEight Penn seniors were named recipients of the 2020 President’s Engagement Prize. They are Aditya Siroya, Shivansh Inamdar, and Artemis Panagopoulou, for Aarogya; Meera Menon and Philip Chen, for The Unscripted Project; and Kwaku Owusu, Mckayla Warwick, and Hyungtae Kim, for Collective Climb. Nikil Ragav was named this year’s President’s Innovation Prize winner for his project, inventXYZ.