Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. and Vice Provost for Faculty Laura W. Perna announce this year’s Ivy Plus Provost Leadership Fellows of the Faculty Advancement Network, a consortium of 13 research universities collaborating to advance excellence at scale through a thriving professoriate. They will participate in the 2025-2026 Institute on Faculty Voice & Collaborative Leadership, which will aim to cultivate a shared sense of how universities work and collaborative communication and leadership strategies to protect and advance the excellence of the American research university. Joann Mitchell, Senior Vice President for Institutional Affairs, and Laura W. Perna, Vice Provost for Faculty, serve as Penn’s Steering Committee members for the Faculty Advancement Network.

This year’s Ivy Plus Provost Leadership Fellows are: 

• Ericka Beckman, associate professor and chair of Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Arts & Sciences, who focuses on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America.   
• Angela Gibney, Presidential Professor of Mathematics in the School of Arts & Sciences, who researches moduli spaces of complex curves and, more recently, vertex operator algebras, core topics that arise in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, and mathematical physics.
• David Kirk, professor and chair of criminology in the School of Arts & Sciences, who focuses on the causes and consequences of cynicism and distrust of the police and the law, solutions to criminal recidivism, and the causes and consequences of gun violence.
• Davesh Soneji, associate professor and chair of South Asia studies in the School of Arts & Studies, who studies social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology, focusing primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India.
• Leigh Stearns, professor of Earth & environmental science in the School of Arts & Sciences, who focuses on ice sheet dynamics and sea level rise, shifts in iceberg and sea ice distributions in Arctic shipping lanes, and glacier loss and water availability at low latitudes.