Interim Provost Beth A. Winkelstein and Vice Provost for Faculty Laura Perna are pleased to announce the appointment of the fourteenth cohort of Penn Fellows.

The Penn Fellows Program provides leadership development to select Penn faculty in mid-career. Launched in 2009, it includes opportunities to build alliances across the university, meet distinguished academic leaders, think strategically about university governance, and consult with Penn’s senior administrators.

Wale Adebanwi, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies social mobilization of power and interests in Africa as manifested through ethnicity, nationalism, racial and urban formations, elites, state and civil society, media intellectual history, and social theory.

Tobias Baumgart, a professor of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches the physical chemistry of amphiphile membranes with lateral heterogeneity resulting from non-ideal mixing, including characterization of biologically relevant membranes such as lipids and proteins.

Rhonda Boyd, an associate professor of psychology in psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine, researches depression among youth and perinatal women, including maternal depression, especially postpartum depression, among women of color and their children.

Xu Cheng, an associate professor of economics in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies econometric theory and applied econometrics.

Norma Coe, an associate professor of medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, researches causal effects of policies that directly and indirectly impact health, human behavior, health care access, and health care use.

Lance Freeman, the James W. Effron University Professor in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the School of Arts and Sciences, studies how neighborhoods change and evolve over time, the role neighborhoods play in people’s lives, and how social media and other new technologies can be used as tools to study neighborhoods.

Roberto Gonzales (deferred), the Richard Perry University Professor of sociology and educationin the School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education, researches factors that shape and reduce economic, legal, and social inequalities among vulnerable and hard-to-reach youth populations as they transition to adulthood. 

Eleni Katifori, an associate professor of physics and astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches the physics behind the morphological and functional attributes of living organisms, focusing on questions inspired by and related to biological transport networks and the elasticity and geometry of thin sheets.

Michele Margolis, an associate professor of political science in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies American politics, with a focus on public opinion, political psychology, experimental methods, and religion and politics. 

Mary-Hunter McDonnell, an associate professor of management in the Wharton School, draws on organizational theory and political sociology to study organizational behavior within challenging institutional contexts, such as contentious social environments and uncertain regulatory environments.

Nova Panebianco, an associate professor of emergency medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses on clinical ultrasound, with expertise in emergency, bedside, critical care, point-of-care ultrasound, and ultrasound-guided peripheral intravenous catheter placement.

Hyunjoon Park, the Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches how schools and families affect children’s education, especially social stratification, family, and social demography in a cross-national comparative perspective, with a focus on Korea and other East Asian countries. 

Dipti Pitta, an associate professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, focuses on ruminant nutrition, including nutrient uptake and utilization, feed additives, feed supplements, and microbial diversity in the rumen in response to diet and dietary shifts.

Andrew Saunders, an associate professor of architecture in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, researches computational geometry as it relates to aesthetics, emerging technology, fabrication, and performance.

Aleksandra Vojvodic, the Rosenbluth Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, studies theoretical and computational-driven materials design, with a focus on the exploration of new catalysts for chemical transformations and energy conversion.

Li-San Wang, professor of pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, researches the genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease and related forms of dementia, as well as computational methods for big data in genomics research.

Yu Zhang, a professor in the School of Dental Medicine, focuses his research on developing functionally graded and nanostructured materials for dental and biomedical devices and elucidating competing damage modes in all-ceramic restorations under mastication.