In the newly released 2021 U.S. News & World Report ranking of United States universities, Penn was ranked #8. Penn was also ranked #17 in Best Value Schools and #25 (tied with four others) for Most Innovative Schools among national universities.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has retained its #1 spot as the best undergraduate business program in the country, which it has held for many years. It is also ranked #1 in both finance and real estate; #2 in management, marketing and production/operations management; #3 in quantitative analysis; #4 in accounting and business analytics; #5 in entrepreneurship, insurance and international business.
Jennifer Wilcox: Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy
Jennifer Wilcox has been named the Presidential Distingished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy. As a global society, the use of fossil fuels has resulted in an exponential rise in CO2 concentrations. The best approach would be to avoid such emissions by fully transitioning away from the combustion of hydrocarbons.
But that approach alone is no longer enough, said Dr. Wilcox. Her research focuses on innovative ways to avoid new CO2 emissions from entering the air as well as the removal of old emissions in order to mitigate the accumulating effects of fossil fuels on our planet.
“Although my work involves removing carbon dioxide from air, it doesn’t mean that it’s a silver bullet,” said Dr. Wilcox. “We need a portfolio of solutions. And we need to start treating CO2 as a waste and figure out solutions to deal with it. We also need to recognize that the portfolio is broad and includes both deep decarbonization and direct removal.”
Dr. Wilcox is the first faculty research appointment at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, based at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at Penn. Her professorial appointment is in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, where she will advance her work on trace metal and carbon capture, while connecting these efforts to actionable energy policy.
Dr. Wilcox’s fall appointment follows an anonymous $30 million dollar gift to the Kleinman Center in 2019—which was matched by additional resources from the University to support building Penn’s energy policy faculty with hires like Dr. Wilcox.
“Mitigating climate change calls on designers and planners to work more closely with scientists and engineers, and Jennifer Wilcox will be instrumental in that work,” said Frederick Steiner, dean and Paley Professor at Weitzman.
“Jennifer’s arrival demonstrates the extraordinary commitment of the University to invest in energy research here at Penn,” said Mark Alan Hughes, faculty director of the Kleinman Center.
Dr. Wilcox spent a week at Penn last spring as a visiting scholar at the Kleinman Center, where she presented a public lecture, recorded a podcast episode, and later published a policy digest on the topic of carbon dioxide removal from the air.
Dr. Wilcox’s lab will be housed in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her focus on carbon management has implications for a variety of applied technologies, including directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; capturing it at the source (from power plants and the industrial sector); and sequestering that carbon dioxide to safely re-use it or permanently store it back in the ground. Dr. Wilcox’s current research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the private sector.
“Penn Engineering prides itself on creating innovative, technology-based solutions that are necessary to solve real-world societal problems,” said Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “Jennifer’s excellent work, both in technology and policy, is central to solving key global energy and environmental challenges.”
“I’m really excited to join the Penn faculty in a joint position that will enable the results of my research to be more broadly impactful through informed policy,” said Dr. Wilcox. “As a chemical engineer, our fundamental training leads us to have an inherent appreciation for complex energy and material balances. By both avoiding carbon and actively removing it from the atmosphere on the scale of gigatons will force us to appreciate and acknowledge these calculations that depend on Earth’s limited resources. In Chemical Engineering and at the Kleinman Center, my goal will be to help in creating the human capital required to meet this gigaton-scale challenge, which will ultimately be required for meeting our climate goals.”
Dr. Wilcox comes to Penn from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she was the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering. She has served on a number of committees at the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. She is the author of the first textbook on carbon capture, published in March 2012.
Having grown up in rural Maine, Dr. Wilcox has a profound appreciation of nature, which permeates her work as she focuses on minimizing negative impacts of humankind on our natural environment.
$3.6 Million NIMH Grant for Firearm Safety Research for Penn Medicine
A grant awarded to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will help improve the implementation of an evidence-based firearm safety program and identify the best approach for deploying this program. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is funding the work with a $3.6 million grant over five years.
“We know that safe gun storage will result in saved lives of young people, and there’s an underused resource which can help provide information on firearm safety—pediatric primary care doctors,” said principal investigator Rinad S. Beidas, associate professor of psychiatry at Penn and director of the Penn Implementation Science Center at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Dr. Beidas has a personal connection to firearm safety, having lost a family member to suicide by firearm in 2013. “After visiting the pediatrician that same year with my newborn son, I saw a huge opportunity for firearm safety promotion—our doctor asked us about home safety related to car seats and smoke detectors, but not safe firearm storage. Our previous research has shown that both clinicians and parents find firearm safety to be an appropriate topic to discuss in the primary care setting, yet these conversations do not happen routinely.”
This work builds on previously funded research from Dr. Beidas and the Mental Health Research Network—a consortium of 14 research centers affiliated with the nation’s largest integrated health systems—where the team gathered feedback from pediatric clinicians, health system leaders, and firearm-owning parents to understand how to best implement Safety Check, an evidence-based firearm safety program. The program involves brief counseling in the pediatric primary care setting and providing a free cable lock to all parents who would like to take one. This approach has been shown to double the odds of self-reported safe firearm storage among parents, but has not been implemented widely. As part of their previous work, the team adapted Safety Check, now called SAFE Firearm, to enhance implementation as a universal suicide prevention strategy.
The research team will study two different approaches for implementing the SAFE Firearm program in pediatric primary care and also evaluate the effectiveness of the program on parental safe firearm storage. The first approach will nudge clinicians to implement the program using the electronic health record (EHR). The second approach will include the nudge in the EHR plus one year of support for the clinics with implementation barriers—such as clinician comfort with discussing firearm safety and helping clinics integrate this program into their workflow. The team hopes to answer whether the EHR-based nudge is powerful enough to effectively implement the program or if facilitation is needed.
The study will include 151 clinicians in 32 clinics who serve 38,989 youth annually in two large health systems in Michigan and Colorado. Results aim to guide future efforts to promote firearm safety as a universal suicide prevention strategy nationally.
“It is an honor to build on thoughtful, partnered work that we have been driving in collaboration with a range of stakeholders over the past five years. Our work would not be possible without the voices of the various experts we have engaged with, including the firearm community,” Dr. Beidas said. “This funding provides us with an important opportunity to accelerate our research with the Mental Health Research Network in hopes of achieving our shared mission of keeping youth safe.”
Additional Penn co-investigators include Alison Buttenheim, Shari Jager-Hyman, Kristin Linn, Steven Marcus, Dylan Small, and Courtney Wolk.
Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell: $823,000 from State to Battle COVID-19
Penn Dental Medicine is among the 23 state-wide awardees from the administration of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf to advance coronavirus research. The award to the lab of Henry Daniell, W.D. Miller Professor in the department of basic and translational sciences, is part of $10 million in grant funding through the state’s COVID-19 Vaccines, Treatments and Therapies (CV-VTT) program to support the rapid advancement of vaccines, treatments, and therapies.
“We are thrilled to see this commitment from the state of Pennsylvania in our collective battle against COVID-19,” said Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean Mark S. Wolff. “Dr. Daniell’s research through his unique plant-based platform holds the potential for transformative application.”
Dr. Daniell was awarded just over $823,000 to accelerate the progress of two novel strategies for combating COVID-19, both of which leverage decades of experience with the successful development of plant-based protein therapies to develop targeted oral therapeutics and vaccination strategies.
In the therapeutic realm, Dr. Daniell, who has an appointment in the biochemistry department at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine—in collaboration with Kenneth Margulies of PSOM—is pursuing first-in-human studies of an oral preparation that directly supplements two beneficial proteins—ACE2 and its protein product, angiotensin (1-7)—that are severely depleted in COVID-19 patients. It will assess whether a drug developed for a very different condition—pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH)—could reduce lung and heart injuries in coronavirus patients.
Reduced ACE2 expression has been linked to acute respiratory distress, severe lung injury, multi-organ failure and death, especially in older patients. Dr. Daniell’s earlier preclinical studies in PAH animal models showed that orally delivered ACE2 made in plant cells accumulated ten times higher in the lungs than in the blood and safely treated PAH. His proposed clinical studies through this grant award would explore whether oral supplementation of ACE2 and angiotensin (1-7) can help mitigate complications of COVID-19 disease.
“Due to the rapid evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, most therapeutic strategies being explored to mitigate the severe respiratory and extrapulmonary pathology caused by COVID-19 infection involve the repurposing of antiviral therapies that have been developed for other viral infections,” explained Dr. Daniell. “Few are endeavoring to specifically target the pathophysiologic mechanisms invoked by COVID-19 infection, which is what we plan to do.”
In the vaccination realm, Dr. Daniell is developing a plant-based oral vaccination to induce durable mucosal immunity suitable for boosting waning immunity following an injected vaccine.
“Amidst an explosion of vaccine development efforts, virtually all COVID-19 vaccination strategies are employing injectable vaccines that will produce systemic immunity, but will not promote mucosal immunity,” said Dr. Daniell. “Mucosal immunity is required to protect at viral entry ports and to be more durable and effective in patients with compromised immune systems due to advanced age or comorbidities.” For evaluation of his vaccine in Rhesus Macaque monkeys, Dr. Daniell will collaborate with Jay Berzofsky, chief of the Vaccine Branch at the Center for Cancer Research, NIH.
For both the therapeutic and vaccination strategies, Dr. Daniell is pursuing strategic, short-term funding—like the CV-VTT grant—to enable augmented infrastructure and preliminary safety and efficacy data that will position both strategies for further funding from federal and/or commercial entities.
The CV-VTT program was made available to Pennsylvania-based entities that demonstrate both a financial need and a well-defined pathway to the accelerated commercialization of a new vaccine, treatment, or therapy in direct response to COVID-19. Dr. Daniell’s award was the larger of two awards within Penn.
Funding for the program was appropriated from the Act 2A of 2020, known as the COVID-19 Emergency Supplement to the General Appropriation Act of 2019, to the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH), to be administered through a Notice of Subgrant by the Department of Community and Economic Development’s (DCED) Office of Technology and Innovation.
Climate Week at Penn—September 21-25: Something for Everyone
You’ve heard of climate change. . . but has its meaning really struck home? We are in a climate emergency. How do we know? Take any statement you’ve recently heard:
- The hottest decade in a century
- The highest temperature ever in the Arctic
- The most hurricanes
- The greatest ice sheet loss
- The most rapid sea level rise
- The worst wild fire season
- The highest level of atmospheric CO2 in 25 million years
And redirect it towards the future:
- Hot as it is, we are now experiencing the coolest decade of the next century
- We will see higher temperatures in the Arctic
- There will be more frequent and more extreme hurricanes
- Ice sheet loss will accelerate
- Sea level rise will increase rapidly and irreversibly over the next 300 years
- This is the mildest wild fire season compared to what’s coming
- This is the lowest level of CO2 in the foreseeable future
As climate journalist Mary Heglar says, “The climate crisis is not the Great Equalizer. It’s the Great Multiplier.” Everyone is affected, but it multiplies problems and threats unequally, compounding social inequities. In this time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, everyone is called on to increase their knowledge of the climate emergency and how to respond. Our actions determine our future, whether in West Philadelphia or the Global South.
No matter where you are in the Penn community, one or more of the 40 Climate Week events will speak to you. Here are just a few examples:
Climate Week at Penn is online and accessible to everyone September 21-25. Choose your events now: www.upenn.edu/climateweek.
—Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor
Chair of the Climate Week at Penn Planning Team
From the Provost and the Vice Provost for Faculty: New Initiatives to Support Faculty
We are enormously grateful for your work in sustaining our academic mission this year. As we enter the second week of the semester, we have already heard from many students about how excited and appreciative they are for the engagement of their professors and advisors.
We also know that this is a challenging time, in which we are all navigating uncharted waters. We are therefore advancing three new initiatives to support faculty members. First, we have prepared a Faculty Guide, with extensive guidance for teaching, mentoring, hiring, and promotion during the pandemic, as well as for furthering our shared goals of equity and inclusion. It also includes discussion of resources for managing child and family care and information about our new COVID-19 Childcare Grants and other potential sources of support.
Second, we have established a Research Recovery Program with funding opportunities to mitigate the financial impacts of the pandemic, provide bridge funding between external grants, and support biomedical research on topics related to disparities in health care or carried out by faculty members disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
Third, we are extending the probationary period by one year for all assistant professors and associate professors without tenure in the tenure, clinician-educator, and research tracks, provided your review has not already begun, you are not in your mandatory or terminal year, and you have not already received an extension related to COVID-19. This extension recognizes the multiple implications of this unprecedented year for faculty life, work/life balance, and research productivity. Among other challenges, faculty members may have lost access to labs and field research sites, faced slowdowns in journal and other publication processes, been unable to disseminate research at conferences, and experienced unprecedented family and caregiving responsibilities—all while working to revamp courses for online delivery and devoting considerable time to advising and supporting our students. Faculty may also be undergoing increased stress and anxiety and allocating increased effort and energy to advance social and racial justice in our communities.
The automatic extension is designed to offer maximum flexibility. It does not require you to opt in, yet it can also be waived. It can be used to delay a reappointment review or be applied to a second appointment term, does not count against the total number of permitted extensions or total time in the probationary period, and does not preclude future extensions for reasons outlined in the Faculty Handbook Section II.E.3. We want to reassure you that the extension will carry no negative consequences for your review. Internal and external reviewers will be informed of the University-wide extension policy and its context in the global public health emergency.
Eligible faculty members will receive individualized letters, after which you are advised to work with your chair and/or dean to discuss how best to apply the extension to your individual situation and timeline.
Thank you for all you are doing for our community. We look forward to working together this year, and we will continue to keep you updated as this semester moves forward.
—Wendell Pritchett, Provost
—Laura Perna, Vice Provost for Faculty
From the Provost and the Vice Provost for Research: Penn Research Recovery Program
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research community valiantly implemented a rapid ramp down of on-campus research, continued much research remotely and, since June 8, has been resuming on-campus research safely and effectively. The resilience of the community has been inspiring. Nevertheless, these circumstances have had a profound impact on research. And it has become clear that the negative impact on research progress, and potentially on career trajectories, is not distributed equally across the community. In addition to highlighting the obvious, that bench research, human-subjects research, and field research are more impacted than is theoretical research, recent studies have quantified the disproportionate impact on some groups, including women, families with young children, underrepresented groups, and pre-tenure faculty. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0921-y) And recent events have emphasized that many in these groups also struggle against systemic racism.
In the face of these challenges, we have been responding to the pressures on our research enterprise. In the last few months, we have:
- Temporarily suspended the five-year limit on postdoc terms to provide flexibility in the challenging employment environment
- Opened the upcoming Provost’s Diversity Post Doc program to Penn graduates
- Underwritten the budget deficit in animal care so that it will not impact research budgets
- Provided PPE and disinfecting supplies from FRES and EHRS and from the schools
- Submitted a FEMA application for funds to cover research related emergency expenses
- Advocated for spending flexibility on federal grants and for federal allocations to fund supplements and COVID-19 related research
As we look forward, many challenges remain. The Research Recovery Program is designed to mitigate some impacts of the pandemic on research at Penn. It will be supported with a combination of funds redirected from current programs, augmented with funds from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The goals of the Research Recovery Program are to:
- Mitigate negative pandemic related impacts on research at Penn
- Prioritize those disproportionately impacted by the pandemic
The Research Recovery Program establishes four new mechanisms to mitigate unexpected costs, exploit new research opportunities, and support bridge projects. This program will emphasize the challenges in populations disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.
Research Disruption Mitigation Fund (opening September 20)
The Research Disruption Mitigation Fund will make grants up to $40,000 to mitigate the financial impact of research ramp down and resumption. The grants will be awarded for unexpected costs expended during the shut-down or required for ramp-up. Pre-tenure faculty and/or those disproportionately impacted by the pandemic are eligible.
Research Transition Fund (opening September 20)
The Research Transition Fund will make grants up to $15,000 to support COVID-19 induced gaps in research experienced in social science and humanities disciplines. Pre-tenure faculty and/or those disproportionately impacted by the pandemic are eligible.
Social Inequality in Health Status and Health Care (open now: submit ASAP but no later than September 23)
This program will curate research grant concepts that qualify for the Pennsylvania CURE program. Grants range from $200,000 to $800,000 over four years. Eligible fields are biomedical basic science research and health services research including behavioral research and healthcare delivery. The emphasis for this research opportunity is on:
- Topics addressing various aspects of disparities in health status
- General biomedical research carried out by faculty disproportionately impacted by COVID-19
- Faculty in all disciplines are eligible with the exception of those fields/programs with substantial support already committed from this program
Bridge Grants (schedule determined in the schools)
Bridge grants are designed to provide gap funding between external grants when it is expected that the extra support would secure a new grant. Given the extended disruption in research this spring, it is anticipated that this need will increase compared to previous years. Processes are in place within the schools to manage bridge grant requests. Information should be available from department chairs.
—Wendell Pritchett, Provost
—Dawn Bonnell, Vice Provost for Research
Initiatives to Support Your Academic and Scholarly Pursuits
A Message To Graduate and Professional Students, September 1, 2020
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the start of a new academic year at Penn. While this semester will be unlike any other fall, we look forward to providing you with the very best graduate and professional education and Penn experience. As the year begins, we want to update you on new and ongoing initiatives to support your academic and scholarly pursuits and to provide you with a secure and healthy environment.
The General Fee has been reduced by 10% for the Fall 2020 semester for all graduate and professional students, as you may already know, and PhD and research master’s tuition will remain at 2019-2020 levels for the Fall semester. Professional schools and programs set their own tuition, so we advise you to follow up directly with your program if you have any questions.
We are also giving all PhD and research master’s students an expanded option to take courses pass/fail during the Fall 2020 semester. Research students may take an unlimited number of classes pass/fail, and any courses taken on a pass/fail basis during Spring and Fall 2020 will not count against the total number of courses you may take pass/fail. You must opt in to this expanded pass/fail option by Friday, October 30, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time, using Penn InTouch. Professional students should check with their schools and programs to learn what grading options are being offered.
In addition, we are currently offering three grant programs; all have a September 18 deadline:
Penn is committed to the wellbeing of our students all over the world. Please see our Wellness at Penn resources for information about COVID testing, contact tracing, etc. We require all students to participate in PennOpen Pass, a daily symptom checker. We also expect all students to adhere to public health requirements and follow the Campus Compact. The Student Health Service and Counseling and Psychological Services remain available to students regardless of where you are located. PhD students who have advanced to candidacy may submit a petition to travel if absolutely necessary to support research and academic progress.
We’d also like to remind all students about the Graduate Group Feedback Form for Students. This form is open all the time and can be filled out by any graduate student, anonymously or not, to provide feedback on their graduate experience.
We work closely with the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GAPSA) to identify and implement solutions to the most important concerns of graduate and professional students. We appreciate GAPSA’s partnership over the years and would especially like to acknowledge GAPSA’s help in providing support for COVID-related grants to graduate and professional students in the spring and fall of this year. We encourage you to work with GAPSA to share your ideas and suggestions in the year ahead—and to interact with the University’s Graduate Student Center on Locust Walk, as well as the Family Resource Center, which provides resources and support for students with children.
We invite all of our new graduate and professional students to watch a special “Welcome to New Students from the President and Provost,” and we wish all of you a safe, healthy, and academically engaging semester!
—Wendell E. Pritchett, Provost
—Beth A. Winkelstein, Deputy Provost
Health and Safety of Penn Community: COVID-19 Testing
September 11, 2020
The health and safety of our community remain our highest priorities. As we complete the second week of the fall semester, we continue our strong commitment to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spread within the Penn community.
This message provides an overview of the tools, including testing, that we have and will use during the fall semester. Our primary tools to minimize person-to-person transmission are:
- wearing facial coverings
- staying physically distanced
- washing our hands
- completing daily PennOpen Pass symptom checks
Testing also allows us to identify individuals who are positive for SARS-CoV-2 so that they can be isolated in order to prevent the spread.
Preparing the Campus for the Fall Semester
In order to prevent the introduction and spread of COVID-19 as students returned to the West Philadelphia area for the fall semester, the University provided gateway testing for undergraduates and graduate students involved in on-campus activities to screen asymptomatic individuals. This gateway testing began on August 1 and ends on September 12. We are very fortunate that more than 10,000 tests revealed a less than 1% positivity rate. Weekly updates on testing results can be found on our COVID-19 Dashboard.
Our Approach to Testing During the Fall Semester
As we transition from gateway testing, we have identified additional strategies and planned for the following priorities:
1. Symptomatic Testing
Penn, along with our partners in Penn Medicine, established an ongoing comprehensive program for tracking COVID-19 symptoms among students, faculty, postdocs, and staff who participate in PennOpen Pass. This rapid identification tool, in tandem with the gateway testing, is an effective strategy for minimizing person- to-person spread of disease. Completing daily symptom checks in PennOpen Pass is critical to sustaining the health of our community.
2. Close Contact Testing
PennOpen Pass also allows for the rapid identification of those individuals with potential exposure to the virus and their referral to testing at Houston Hall, based on the timing of the exposure and assessment of the risk of infection.
3. Mitigating the Risk of Transmission Through Ongoing Testing
We know that up to 15%-25% of people with COVID-19 may not display symptoms but are still capable of transmitting the virus. Having reviewed data from outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses across the U.S., we will ask segments of the Penn community to be tested on a weekly basis, even in the absence of symptoms. This approach, called surveillance testing, will apply to students, faculty, postdocs, and staff who have a sustained presence on campus in congregate settings, defined as environments in which a number of people reside, meet, or gather in a common shared space, in environments without the use of personal protective equipment (which is used, for example, by health care practitioners in a clinical or laboratory setting). Using this data-driven approach for those with a heightened risk of transmission, we will send invitations to enroll in surveillance testing, beginning on September 14, to:
- Students, faculty, postdocs, and staff who are present on campus for at least 8 hours every week and whose activities are done in a congregate setting that involves at least 10 people.
- Students, faculty, postdocs, and staff who share a residential space with three or more individuals with whom they are not related, including those who live in College Houses.
Moving Forward
Technology and access to testing are advancing quickly. While we will continue to use nasal swab testing for the fall semester, we are continuing to explore the feasibility of novel testing options for the spring semester.
In partnership and in health,
Benoit Dubé, MD
Associate Provost and Chief Wellness Officer