Penn Faculty Fellows

The Penn Fellows Program provides leadership development to select Penn faculty in mid-career. Begun 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.

2023 Penn Fellows

Amalia Z. Daché, An Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, studies postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, Afro-Latinx studies, community and student resistance, and the college-access experiences of African diasporic students and communities.

Joe Devietti, An Associate Professor and Undergraduate Curriculum Chair of Computer & Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, studies computer architecture and programming languages, especially making multiprocessors easier to program by leveraging changes in both computer architectures and parallel programming models.

David Dillenberger, A Professor and Graduate Chair of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies microeconomic theory and decision theory, especially social preferences, models of non-expected utility, and the economics of risk and time.

Kristen R. Ghodsee, A Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the lived experience of socialism and postsocialism, the gendered effects of the economic transition from communism to capitalism, and postcommunist nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe.

Angela Gibney, a Presidential Professor of Mathematics in the School of Arts and Sciences, is an algebraic geometer who has obtained deep results about moduli spaces of complex curves and vertex operator algebras—core topics that arise in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, and mathematical physics.

Jeffrey Green, A Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences and director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, is a political theorist with a broad interest in democracy, ancient and modern political philosophy, and contemporary social theory.

Roy H. Hamilton, A Professor of Neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the characteristics and limits of functional neuroplasticity in the adult human brain, including how the brain reorganizes itself in response to injury and the brain’s potential for reorganization in order to speed rehabilitation using noninvasive electrical or magnetic brain stimulation.

Blanca E. Himes, An Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies asthma pathogenesis and treatment using biomedical informatics approaches, including genome-wide association studies of asthma and related traits as a lead investigator and as part of large collaborations.

Taku Kambayashi, A Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies signal transduction pathways employed by cells involved in fundamental immunological processes and in immune-related disorders, especially the mechanistic underpinnings of these processes to identify novel targets for therapeutic intervention or for diagnostic/prognostic value.

Mia Levine, An Associate Professor of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the biological forces that drive the evolution of chromatin proteins, which package our genomic DNA yet are wildly unconserved over evolutionary time, and the functional consequences for chromosome segregation, telomere integrity, and genome defense.

Sarah E. Light, A Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics in the Wharton School, works at the intersections of environmental law, corporate sustainability, and business innovation, including the ways in which laws that structure corporations and the marketplace should be considered forms of environmental law and how private actions by business firms can be forms of private environmental governance.

Beth Linker, the Samuel H. Preston Associate Professor and chair of history and sociology of science in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the history of science and medicine, disability, healthcare policy, and gender, including research on rehabilitation and on postural abnormalities in early 20th century America.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies race, gender, and politics in the Americas, including urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationships among scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement.

Amy M. Sawyer, An Associate Professor of Biobehavioral Health Sciences in the School of Nursing, studies health behaviors related to sleep disorders, especially the differences between adults who consistently use treatments for their sleep-disordered breathing and those who do not, the development and testing of a non-adherence risk screening index, and the design/testing of interventions to improve treatment use.

Frank Setzer, An Associate Professor of Endodontics in the School of Dental Medicine, works on the clinical detection, prognosis, and assessment of periradicular pathology, especially apical periodontitis, CBCT imaging and artificial intelligence, and endodontic microsurgery.

Meredith Tamminga, An Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of Linguistics in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the ways in which social, temporal, and spatial patterns of linguistic variation reflect the underlying structure of the human capacity for language, using experimental psycholinguistic methods, computational modeling, and the quantitative analysis of natural speech data to learn how speakers store and produce linguistic variables.

2022 Penn Fellows

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

Tobias Baumgart, Professor of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses his research on the physical chemistry of amphiphile membranes with lateral heterogeneity resulting from non-ideal mixing. The aim is to include characterization of biologically relevant membranes including lipids and proteins, where we investigate both composition and shape (curvature) heterogeneity. Both of these aspects are thought to be highly relevant to the function of biological membranes.

Rhonda Boyd, Associate Professor of Psychology in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on depression among youth and perinatal women. She has a line of research examining maternal depression, especially postpartum depression, among women of color and their children and developing preventive interventions aimed at these families. She also conducts research on risk and protective factors among youth, especially Black adolescents, with a recent focus on understanding youth depression and suicidal ideation and behaviors.

Xu Cheng, Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses her research on interests that include econometric theory and applied econometrics.

Norma Coe, Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on identifying causal effects of policies that directly and indirectly impact health, human behavior, health care access, and health care utilization.

Lance Freeman, Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, has joint appointments in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the Department of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences. He 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.

Eleni Katifori, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, is interested in understanding the physics behind the morphological and functional attributes of living organisms. Her research primarily focuses on questions inspired by and related to biological transport networks and the elasticity and geometry of thin sheets.

Michele Margolis, Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses her research on public opinion, political psychology, experimental methods, and religion and politics.

Catherine C. McDonald, Associate Professor of Nursing in the School of Nursing, focuses here research on promoting health and reducing injury in youth. She leads a strong portfolio of research on adolescent funded by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control.

Mary-Hunter McDonnell, Associate Professor of Management in the Wharton School, focuses her research on organizational theory and political sociology to explore political interactions between corporations and their myriad stakeholders. In particular, she is interested in how a company’s interactions with its stakeholders shape corporate social activity and non-marketing strategy.

Nova Panebianco, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses in clinical ultrasound with expertise in emergency, bedside, critical care, point-of-care ultrasound, and ultrasound-guided peripheral intravenous catheter placement.

Hyunjoon Park, Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses his research on how educational stratification at the individual and school levels is mediated by national contexts of structural features of educational systems such as differentiation and standardization, and state involvement in family welfare. His work also examines how schooling environments shape students’ educational outcomes by exploring potential benefits of single-sex schooling among high school students in South Korea.

Dipti Pitta, Assistant Professor of Ruminant Nutrition in the School of Veterinary Medicine, focuses her research on farming, nutrient uptake and utilization, feed additives, feed supplements, and microbial diversity in the rumen in response to diet and dietary shifts.

Andrew SaundersAssociate Professor of Architecture in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, focuses his research on computational geometry as it relates to aesthetics, emerging technology, fabrication and performance.

Aleksandra Vojvodic, 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 particular 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 Dementia, and computational methods for big data genomics research.

Yu Zhang, Professor of Restorative Dentistry, Preventive & Restorative Sciences in the School of Dental Medicine, focuses his research on developing functionally graded and nanostructured materials for dental and biomedical devices, elucidating competing damage modes in all-ceramic restorations under mastication, characterizing the wear and fatigue behavior of dental materials, and improving the fracture resistance of veneered prostheses through the reduction of deleterious residual tensile stresses.

2021 Penn Fellows

Danielle Bassett, Professor of Bioengineering and Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the structure and function of networks, predominantly in physical and biological systems.

Nelson Flores, Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics Division in the Graduate School of Education, focuses on how language and race intersect in bilingual education policies and practices in ways that are harmful to bilingual students of color.

Maria Geffen, Associate Professor of Otorhinolaryngology, Neuroscience and Neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine, researches the way the brain encodes information about the world and how our perception is shaped by our emotional state and experience.

Nancy Hodgson, Chair and Professor of Biobehavioral Health Science in the School of Nursing, focuses on the development, testing, and dissemination of person-centered and family-centered interventions for persons living with dementia.

Sara Jaffee, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches at-risk families and children and how stressful environments exacerbate underlying genetic vulnerabilities to affect children’s development, with a special interest in children’s antisocial behavior.

Mechthild Pohlschröder, Professor of Biology and Undergraduate Chair in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on microbiology, cell and developmental biology, genetics, and genomics.

Elizabeth Rhoades, Professor of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, aims to elucidate the principles that link protein conformational change with structure-function relationships, focusing on understanding structural plasticity in intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs).

Wendy Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies how social processes challenge racial and ethnic boundaries and transform classification systems, as well as how these processes change conceptions of the nature of race.

Patrick Seale, Associate Professor of Cell and Development Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses on obesity through the biology of adipose (fat) cells and tissue. Adipose tissue is a highly dynamic and plastic organ, regulating many aspects of whole-body physiology.

Russell Shinohara, Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine, centers his research on the assessment of structural and functional changes in the brain throughout development and in neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders.

Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts Emerging Design Practices in the Weitzman School of Design, works in a unique area called biological design, an emerging field that is shaped in the intersection of manufacturing, environmental sciences, and computational design.

Tariq Thachil, Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India, in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches political parties and political behavior, identity politics, and urbanization with a regional focus on India.

Harsha Thirumurthy, Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Associate Director of Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics in the Perelman School of Medicine, specializes in the intersection of economics and public health, with a focus on HIV prevention and treatment as well as maternal and child health.

Kathryn Wellen, Associate Professor of Cancer in the Perelman School of Medicine, researches the intersection of nutrient availability, epigenetic modification and cancer cell metabolism.

Dagmawi Woubshet, Presidential Associate Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences, is a scholar of African American literature and visual culture who works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ, and African studies.

Nancy Zhang, Professor of Statistics, Vice Dean of Wharton Doctoral Programs in the Wharton School, studies the development of statistical and computational approaches for the analysis of genetic, genomic, and transcriptomic data.

2020 Penn Fellows

Faizan Alawi, Professor of Pathology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Dental Medicine, teaches oral and maxillofacial pathology, provides quality care to patients and serves as Director of Penn Oral Pathology Services.

Montserrat C. AngueraAssociate Professor of Biomedical Sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine, focuses her research on how female lymphocytes maintain X-chromosome Inactivation, which is an epigenetic process responsible for equalizing gene expression between sexes.

E. Cabrina Campbell, Professor of Psychiatry and Vice-Chair of Education in the Perelman School of Medicine, has expertise in the management of patients who have severe mental illnesses, and serves as the Director of Residency Training for the Department of Psychiatry.

J. Margo Brooks CarthonAssociate Professor in the School of Nursing and Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, focuses her research and teaching on the issues of marginalization and inequities in healthcare.

Margo CrawfordProfessor of English, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence and Director of the Center for Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, specializes in 20th and 21st-century African American literature, cultural movements, and visual art. She studies radical black imaginations and the global dimensions of black aesthetics.

Karen DetlefsenProfessor of Philosophy and Education in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses her research on early modern philosophy including the history of philosophy of science, the history and philosophy of education, and women in the history of philosophy.

Sandra González-BailónAssociate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, analyzes the sometimes productive and sometimes problematic ways in which big data/data science and the functionality of various network structures are mobilized to solve vexing problems, emphasizing the inextricable links between data science and social science, between computer code and cultural practice.

Sharon Hayes, Professor of Fine Arts in the Weitzman School of Design, works on developing new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political moment as a moment that reaches simultaneously backward and forward, while often addressing political events or movements from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Cait Lamberton, President’s Distinguished Professor in Marketing in the Wharton School, researches consumer decision-making, financial decision-making, and work that impacts critical policy issues of importance to higher education, such as student application for financial aid.

Zachary F. Meisel, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Center for Emergency Care Policy Research in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses research on prescription drug overdose, guideline adherence, opioid use disorder, patient safety, emergency medical services, and patient-centered comparative effectiveness.

Alain Plante, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Undergraduate Chair in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches soil science, ecosystem ecology, environmental science and global change, with a focus on terrestrial carbon biogeochemistry and serves as Faculty Director of the University Scholars Program.

Timothy Rommen, Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College and Professor of Music and Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on coloniality/decoloniality, the political economy of music and sound, creole musical formations, tourism, diaspora, music and spirituality, and the ethics of intellectual history of ethnomusicology.

Sunny Shin, Associate Professor in Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses on uncovering innate immune mechanisms used by the host to defend itself against bacterial pathogens and how bacterial pathogens evade host immunity to cause disease.

Quayshawn SpencerRobert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Arts and Sciences, specializes in philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of race.

Melissa WildeProfessor in Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on the ways in which religious institutions respond to social, cultural, and demographic change.

2019 Penn Fellows

Tami Benton, Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies pediatric psychosomatic illnesses and minority health, specifically Sickle Cell Disease and HIV, and comorbid depressive disorders.

Julia Hartmann, Professor of Mathematics in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on algebraic structures and their symmetries. She in now the faculty sponsor of Penn’s Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) chapter.

De’Broski Herbert, Associate Professor of Infectious Immunology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, researches regulatory networks, immunity, inflammation, tissue repair, and mucosal interface.

Rebecca Hubbard, Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on development and application of statistical methodology for studies that use observational data from clinical medical practice.

Daeyeon Lee, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, focuses his research on developing deep understanding of the interactions between soft materials.

Christopher Lengner, Associate Professor of Cell and Development Biology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, is the Associate Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Director of the Center for Animal Transgenesis. His lab is broadly interested in the mechanisms by which stem cells acquire and maintain developmental potency.

Julia Lynch, Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses her research on the politics of inequality, social policy, and the economy in comparative perspective, with a focus on the countries of Western Europe and the United States.

Matthew McHugh, Professor and Independence Foundation Endowed Chair for Nursing Education in the School of Nursing, has advanced the field of nursing outcomes and policy research by showing the value of investing in nursing as a vehicle to achieve a higher functioning health care system.

Raina Merchant, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, conducts research at the intersection of digital media and health. Much of her work also bridges new technologies in the field of cardiovascular health and resuscitation science.

Masao Sako, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on observational cosmology with supernovae (SNe). He is also interested in several aspects of high energy astrophysics including X-ray spectroscopy and observations of gamma-ray bursts, X-ray binaries, supermassive black holes, and clusters of galaxies.

Ebony Thomas, Associate Professor of Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division in the Graduate School of Education, focuses on children’s and adolescent texts (broadly construed), the teaching of African American literature, history, and culture in K-12 classrooms, and the roles that race, class, and gender play in classroom discourse and interaction.

Franca Trubiano, Associate Professor of Architecture in the School of Design, conducts funded research in the areas of Advanced Energy Retrofits and Building Information Modeling.

Rachel Werner, Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, is a practicing general internist and a PhD-trained health economist. Her research seeks to understand the effect of health care policies and delivery systems on quality of care.

2018 Penn Fellows

Benjamin Abella, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Center of for Resuscitation Science in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies sudden cardiac arrest, a leading cause of death that claims over 300,000 lives each year in the United States. He is also the developer and Medical Director of a novel training course for therapeutic hypothermia use in the hospital setting.

Ritesh Agarwal, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, is developing techniques for the rational synthesis of functional nanostructural materials for applications in nanophotonic and electronic devices. His interests include growth of self-assembled nanostructures, nanoscale physical behavior, and hierarchical assembly of nanostructures into integrated nanosystems.

José A. Bauermeister, Presidential Associate Professor of Nursing in the School of Nursing, researches comprehensive HIV/STI prevention and care programs for high-risk adolescents and young adults, including young gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (YGBMSM); perinatally HIV-infected and HIV-affected youth; and racial/ethnic minorities living in urban centers.

Elizabeth Brannon, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Natural Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches the evolution and development of quantitative cognition, studying how adult humans, infants, young children and nonhuman animals without language represent number.

Samantha Butts, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Perelman School of Medicine, is a reproductive epidemiologist who has made research contributions towards developing a better understanding of how key micronutrients and environmental chemicals affect reproductive health in women and their offspring. She also investigates conditions that impact how women age reproductively and the intersection of race, genetic background, and environmental factors on this process.

André Dombrowski, Associate Professor of History of Art in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses his research and teaching on the arts and material cultures of France and Germany, and their empires, in the mid to late nineteenth century. He is particularly concerned with the social and intellectual rationales behind the emergence of avant-garde painting in the 1860s to 1880s, including Impressionism.

Zahra Fakhraai, Associate Professor of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses on understanding the influence of surfaces and interfaces on the properties of amorphous materials at nanometer length scales. Her research group’s studies on the properties of glasses at nanometer length scales has provided fundamental insight into the length scales of correlated motion in glasses that allows one to engineer glasses with significantly improved properties.

Tulia FalletiClass of 1965 Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program in the School of Arts and Sciences, is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on Latin America whose research interests include democratization, federalism and decentralization, community participation, qualitative research methods, and historical institutionalism.

Autumn Fiester, Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics in the Perelman School of Medicine, is Director of the Penn Program in Clinical Conflict Management, which promotes conflict resolution training for formal clinical ethics consultations and ethics conflicts at the bedside. Dr. Fiester is a consultant for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Ethics Service, and she conducts workshops in conflict management around the country.

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, is a scholar of comparative politics specializing in nationalism, social movements, racial hierarchy, and citizenship. He has done field in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Cuba, Colombia, Ghana, Italy, and Jamaica.

Jennifer Kogan, Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on assessment in medical education, particularly feedback, competency assessment, and developing and assessing the effectiveness of new approaches for faculty development in workplace-based assessment (training faculty to observe and provide feedback about learners’ clinical skills).

Serguei Netessine, Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, focuses his research on business model innovation and operational excellence. He uses a broad set of econometric tools to analyze data that focuses on strategic customer behavior in operational settings.

Rose Nolen-Walston, Associate Professor of Medicine in the School of Veterinary Medicine, has a clinical specialty of large animal medicine and her research focuses on equine encephalitis, equine endotoxemia/sepsis models, equine pulmonary function, histamine bronchoprovocation and large animal emergency.

Melissa Sanchez, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and constitutional and religious history.

Eric Stoopler, Associate Professor of Oral Medicine in the School of Dental Medicine, focuses on the advancement of oral medicine as an integral component of health education and clinical care through the development of postdoctoral oral medicine education.

Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on the Caribbean whose research interests include political anthropology, multi-modal and visual anthropology, sovereignty, violence, the afterlives of imperialism, transnationalism and diaspora, race and gender, performance and popular culture, culture and political economy, and popular culture.

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, Professor of Law and Psychology in Penn Law, studies the psychology of legal decision-making. Her research addresses the role of moral judgment, with a particular focus on private contracts and negotiations. She uses experimental methods from psychology and behavioral economics to ask how people draw on their moral intuitions to motivate or inform legal choices.

2017 Penn Fellows

Ezekiel Dixon-RománAssociate Professor and Chair, Data Analytics for Social Policy Certificate Program in the School of Social Policy and Practice, rethinks the use of quantitative methods from a critical theoretical lens, particularly for the study of social reproduction in human learning and development, such as inheritance and the social reproduction of “difference” and critical inquiry on social policies that seek to address issues of inequality, social mobility and education.

Daniel Gillion, Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science, School of Arts & Sciences, studies racial and ethnic politics, political behavior, public policy and the American presidency, including the role of protest and how political dialogue on race alters the public policy process and shapes societal and cultural norms to improve the lives of racial and ethnic minorities.

Carolina B. LopezAssociate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine, studies the signals that turn on and regulate the immune system during infections with common respiratory viruses (such as the influenza virus or the respiratory syncytial virus), aiming to better understand the factors that modulate virus pathogenesis and develop better vaccines and antiviral therapies.

Christopher MarcinkoskiAssociate Professor of Landscape Architecture, PennDesign, is a licensed architect and urban design consultant who studies “speculative urbanization”–the implications of urbanization activities that are out-of-sync with economic and demographic realities, most recently projects in Africa emulating speculative building in places such as Spain, Ireland, Dubai and China.

Katherine L. Nathanson, Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the genetics of human cancer, both germline changes which confer susceptibility to cancer and somatic genetic changes associated with outcome, including germline genetic changes associated with breast cancer susceptibility, genetic changes associated with testicular cancer susceptibility and somatic genetic markers in melanoma as determinants of response to therapy.

Sandra RyeomAssociate Professor of Cancer Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the molecular mechanisms that regulate the tumor microenvironment, with a particular focus on the vasculature, and how the tumor microenvironment is assembled and maintained, with particular focus on the generation and maintenance of the tumor blood supply (tumor angiogenesis), a dynamic process involving continuous elaboration and remodeling of blood vessels.

Maurice SchweitzerCecilia Yen Koo Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, studies emotions, ethical decision-making and the negotiation process, with a focus on trust and deception, including the recent co-authored Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both, which examines how to maximize success by navigating between cooperation and competition.

Susan YoonAssociate Professor in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division in the Graduate School of Education, focuses on instructional improvement of complex systems in middle and high school science courses through the integration of learning tools such as mobile technologies and multi-computational models. She has worked in conjunction with the School District of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Zoo, and the Franklin Institute of Science Museum.

2016 Penn Fellows

Angela DeMichele, Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence in the Perelman School of Medicine, focuses on developing biomarkers, surveillance strategies and new therapeutic approaches to prevent and treat recurrent, metastatic breast cancer, as well as on research about survivorship.

Hanming Fang, Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics in the School of Arts & Sciences, is an applied microeconomist focusing on public economics, including topics ranging from discrimination, social economics and welfare reform to public good provision mechanisms, auctions and health insurance markets.

Michael Horowitz, associate professor of political science in the School of Arts & Sciences and associate director of the Perry World House, studies military innovation, the future of war, the role of leaders in international politics, the relationships between religion and politics, and other topics with direct implications for public policy.

Hyun (Michel) Koo, professor of orthodontics in the School of Dental Medicine, focuses on understanding the assembly principles and virulence determinants of oral biofilms, as well as developing therapeutic approaches to prevent biofilm-dependent oral infectious diseases such as dental caries.

Sophia Lee, professor of law and history and deputy dean in the Law School, is a legal historian whose scholarship synthesizes labor, constitutional and administrative law, including such topics as challenges to workplace discrimination during the early Cold War and conservative legal movements in the post-New Deal era.

Jason Moore, Edward Rose Professor of Informatics in the Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics, studies genetics and biomedical informatics, especially the development, evaluation and application of novel computational and statistical algorithms for identifying combinations of DNA sequence variations and combinations of environmental factors that are predictive of common disease endpoints.

Christian Terwiesch, Andrew M. Heller Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, studies innovation, especially in healthcare and in innovation tournaments, which provide innovation opportunities for product designers, entrepreneurs and others in such areas as packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, financial services and technology.

2015 Penn Fellows

Marija Drndic, Professor of Physics in the School of Arts & Sciences, studies nanoscale and mesoscopic structures—including nanocrystals, nanowires and biomaterials—especially nanoelectronics and related quantum mechanical effects that arise when electrons are confined in small volumes.

Chao Guo, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management in the School of Social Policy & Practice, studies the intersection of government with nonprofit and voluntary initiatives, especially in such contexts as nonprofit organizations, nonprofit advocacy, nonprofit governance, social entrepreneurship and volunteerism.

Lisa Lewis, Associate Professor of Nursing in the School of Nursing, studies racial disparities in blood pressure control, especially psychosocial factors that contribute to medication adherence among African-Americans, such as spirituality, depression, social support and perceived discrimination.

Joshua Plotkin, Professor of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences and professor of computer and information science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, studies questions in evolutionary biology and ecology using techniques drawn from mathematics and computation, focusing primarily on adaptation in populations.

Alejandro Ribeiro, Associate Professor of Electrical & Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, studies wireless networks, especially the development of theoretical foundations for wireless networks and the application of signal processing to network and wireless communications theory.

Nancy Rothbard, David Pottruck Professor of Management in the Wharton School, studies the impact of emotions on work, especially in such areas as workplace motivation, teamwork, work-life balance and the multiple roles that people play at work and in families.

Emily Steiner, Associate Professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences, studies medieval English literature, including the 14th century allegorical poem “Piers Plowman¸” the relationship between literature and legal practice and medieval “macrogenres” such as encyclopedias and universal histories.

Kevin Turner, Gabel Family Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, studies surface and interface mechanics in micro- and nano-scale systems and processes, including microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing.

2014 Penn Fellows

Paulo ArratiaAssociate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, studies the flow behavior of complex fluids, such as human blood, polymeric solutions, and colloidal suspensions.

Jennifer Blouin, Associate Professor of Accounting in the Wharton School, studies taxation, including the effects of taxes on asset pricing, capital structure, corporate payout policies, and multinational firm behavior.

Sara CherryAssociate Professor of Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the cellular factors that regulate viral pathogenesis, especially in such mosquito-borne viruses as West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever virus.

Justin KhouryAssociate Professor of Physics in the School of Arts and Sciences, works at the intersection of particle physics and cosmology, especially alternative theories of the early universe designed to address traditional problems of “big bang” cosmology.

Emilio ParradoProfessor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies migration, both within and across countries, including immigrant adaptation, international migration, and social and demographic change in Latin America.

Laura PernaProfessor in the Higher Education Division of the Graduate School of Education, studies the forces that may limit and the ways to promote educational attainment, especially among members of historically underrepresented groups.

Adriana Petryna, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the social and political dimensions of science and medicine in the United States and Eastern Europe.  

Ronald RubensteinAssociate Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies novel drug therapies for cystic fibrosis, especially the use of pharmaceuticals to overcome molecular defects and “repair” dysfunctional proteins.

2013 Penn Fellows

Elisabeth Barton, associate professor of anatomy & cell biology in the School of Dental Medicine, studies muscle physiology, especially skeletal muscle repair, with the goal of developing therapies to aid in combatting muscle disease and enhance repair after injury.

William Burke-White, professor and deputy dean in the Law School, is an expert on international law and global governance who served from 2009-2011 on the Policy Planning Staff of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Adam Grant, associate professor of management in the Wharton School, studies work motivation, job design, employee initiative and proactivity, leadership, and burnout and is the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success.

Carmen Guerra, associate professor of medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, specializes in cancer control, especially the barriers to physician recommendation and patient acceptance of cancer screening tests and procedures and the impact of literacy barriers on cancer screening.

John MacDonald, associate professor and chair of criminology in the School of Arts & Sciences, studies a wide variety of topics in criminology, including interpersonal violence, race and ethnic disparities in criminal justice, and the effectiveness of social policy responses to crime.

Kim M. OlthoffDonald Guthrie Professor of Surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Liver Transplant Program at the Penn Transplant Institute, focuses on adult and pediatric liver transplantation, living donor transplantation, and surgery for hepatobiliary malignancies and benign liver tumors.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, associate professor and graduate group chair of history in the School of Arts & Sciences, is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East who is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan.

R. Polk Wagnerprofessor of law in the Law School, is an expert in intellectual property law and policy, with a special interest in patent law, and is the co-author of Patent Law (Concepts and Insights).

2012 Penn Fellows

Patricia D’Antonio, Killebrew-Centis Professor in Undergraduate Education and chair of the Department of Family and Community Health in the School of Nursing, who studies the work and worth of nursing in American hospitals and in the fabric of families and communities.

Mark Duggan, professor of business and public policy in the Wharton School, who studies the effect of government expenditure programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, on the behavior of individuals and firms.

John Hogenesch, associate professor of pharmacology in the Perelman School of Medicine, who studies the mammalian circadian clock, using both genomic and computational tools.

Benjamin Horton, associate professor of earth and environmental science in the School of Arts and Sciences, who studies the external and internal mechanisms of sea-level change, especially its relationship to climate change.

Marisa Kozlowski, professor of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, who studies the design of new methods and catalysts for organic synthesis, including both novel computational tools and traditional methods of screening and development.

Jennifer Lukes, associate professor of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, who studies the thermal transport phenomena that emerge in nanostructures and nanostructured materials.

Beth Winkelstein, professor of bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, who studies the mechanisms of injury that produce whiplash and sports-related and other painful injuries.

2011 Penn Fellows

Vijay Balasubramanian, Merriam Term Associate Professor of Physics in the School of Arts and Sciences, a theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory, black holes, quantum gravity, and applications of neuroscience.

Karen Beckman, Jaffe Professor of Cinema Studies and Art History in the School of Arts and Sciences, a scholar of interdisciplinary visual culture, focusing on the connections among film, photography, and modern art.

Gerard Cachon, Sullivan Professor and Chair of Operations and Information Management in the Wharton School, an expert in supply chain management, especially the impact of new technologies on competitiveness.

Marwan Kraidy, Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, a scholar of global communication, primarily in Arab media, including reality television, music videos, and the structure of the television industry.

John Lapinski, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, a scholar of Congressional lawmaking and a senior election analyst for NBC News.

Erle Robertson, Professor of Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and Director of the Tumor Virology Program at the Abramson Cancer Center, a molecular biologist and virologist whose research centers on Epstein-Barr and Kaposi’s sarcoma viruses.

2010 Penn Fellows

Lisa Bellini, Professor of Medicine and Vice Dean for Resident and Faculty Affairs in the Perelman School of Medicine, an expert on medical education, especially the effects of fatigue and sleep deprivation on patients, residents, and faculty.

Camille Charles, Edmund J. and Louis W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Africana Studies, an expert on race in America, especially in universities and urban environments.

Chanita Hughes-Halbert, Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine, an expert on cancer prevention, especially among minority and other underserved populations.

Kelly Jordan-Sciutto, Associate Professor of Pathology in the School of Dental Medicine, an expert on interdisciplinary approaches to the function and dysfunction of neurons, especially in HIV infection.

Randall Mason, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Chair of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation in the School of Design, an expert on urban planning and the historic preservation of American cities.

Peter Struck, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Classical Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program, an expert on the intellectual history of ancient Greece.

2009 Penn Fellows

Eric Bradlow, K.P. Chao Professor and Professor of Marketing and Statistics at the Wharton School, an expert on applying statistical models to mathematical problems and real-world topics, such as hit songs, Internet search engines, grocery store coupons, and baseball statistics.

Charles Branas, Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, an expert on improvements to public health, especially reducing gun violence and advocating for better emergency and trauma care.

Robert Carpick, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Penn Director of the Nanotechnology Institute, an expert on the nature and origins of tribology (friction) at the atomic or molecular scale.

Marybeth Gasman, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, an expert on issues of leadership, fundraising, and philanthropy at historically African-American colleges.

John Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, an expert on racial identity, especially in Harlem and Brooklyn and among Black Jews.

Joshua Metlay, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, an expert on respiratory tract infections and treatments, especially antibiotic resistance, risks, and optimal practices.

Sharon Thompson-Schill, Professor of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, an expert on the neurological basis of memory and language, including both normal cognition and cognition in those suffering from stroke, degenerative diseases, and congenital blindness.

Sarah Tishkoff, David and Lyn Silfen University Associate Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts and Sciences and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, an expert on human genetics, especially in Africa.