Inspiring interest in water quality at Cobbs Creek
Faculty and staff, high school and Penn students, and community members are working together to collect and analyze the most detailed water quality data to date at the West Philadelphia stream.
As part of Climate Week at Penn, leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy Joseph Romm will lead a workshop titled “Communication is a Climate Solution: How Taylor Swift can Level Up Your Storytelling.”
(Image: Rebecca Blackwell via AP Images)
Taylor Swift, storytelling, and climate communication
Clean energy expert and senior research fellow at Penn Joseph Romm says that Taylor Swift’s lyrics offer storytelling techniques that can be applied for impact-driven climate communications.
Over 20,000 educators share insights on school cell phone policies
Preliminary findings in the landmark research initiative “Phones in Focus” suggest stricter cell phone policies are linked to less disruption and greater teacher satisfaction.
Griffin Pitt, right, works with two other student researchers to test the conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and temperature of water below a sand dam in Kenya.
(Image: Courtesy of Griffin Pitt)
A world shaped by water and access
Griffin Pitt’s upbringing made her passionate about water access and pollution, and Penn has given her the opportunity to explore these issues back home in North Carolina and abroad.
Who, What, Why: Olivia Larson on sleep and memory in mental health disorders
“My overarching goal was to use sleep as a window into the mechanisms that link poor cognitive functioning with poor mental health,” clinical psychology doctoral student Olivia Larson says of her dissertation.
Taking place Oct. 13 to 17, Penn’s sixth Climate Week includes dozens of in-person and virtual events that cross disciplines, from energy policy and history to engineering and medicine
Unlocking a microbial puzzle to better treat, prevent, and detect disease
Penn biologists have identified two enzymes responsible for attaching lipoproteins to membrane lipids in archaea, a single-celled microorganism with great potential for drug delivery, vaccines, and cancer diagnostics.
OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Google vary widely in identifying hate speech
Neil Fasching and Yphtach Lelkes of the Annenberg School for Communication have found dramatic differences in how large language models classify hate speech, with especially large variations for language about certain demographic groups, raising concerns about bias and disproportionate harm.
Through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program, students Ethan Yang, Kevin Li, and Henry Huang worked with linguistics professor Jianjing Kuang to study the ability of AI models to replicate the expressiveness of human speech.
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Where AI models fall short in mimicking the expressiveness of human speech
Undergraduates Kevin Li, Henry Huang, and Ethan Yang worked with linguistics professor Jianjing Kuang to compare speech production and perception by humans and AI—research that can help companies move closer to natural and expressive AI speech.
President J. Larry Jameson offered a message of encouragement, comparing the scaffolding on Fisher Fine Arts Library to the support Penn will provide the Class of 2029, and Provost John L. Jackson Jr. told students they will be challenged both with new ideas and to embrace differences.
