Diversity News

Sarah Banet-Weiser becomes Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication effective on August 14, 2023.

Strunk, an award-winning mixed methods scholar at Michigan State University, is an expert on teacher labor markets, school and district improvement and accountability policies, and efforts to boost student achievement. 

Lee is currently a professor of law with a secondary appointment in history, and has been a member of the Penn Carey Law faculty since 2009.

The Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor will begin his appointment on June 1, 2023.

Two Penn Integrates Knowledge Professors, Konrad Kording and George Demiris, have received named University Professorships.  Kording, a data scientist who studies the brain, will become the Nathan Francis Mossell University Professor.  Demiris, a gerontologist who studies IT to support older adults, will become the Mary Alice Bennett University Professor.  Nathan Francis Mossell graduated in 1882, and became the first African American to earn a medical degree from Penn.  Mary Alice Bennett was a physician and the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. from Penn.

Three faculty from the University of Pennsylvania, Holly Fernandez Lynch of the Perelman School of Medicine, Quayshawn Spencer of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Connie Ulrich of the School of Nursing have been named Hastings Center Fellows for deepening public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.

With over 30 years of Latin American and Latinx studies at Penn, the academic program is now being made into a center.

In a lecture organized by the Penn Program on Regulation, PIK Professor Dorothy E. Roberts argued that the U.S. child welfare system is designed to police Black families, not to protect children, and must be abolished and replaced with a new vision of family support and child safety.

Children in Ghana who were poorer, more food insecure, and went to public schools had fewer opportunities for remote learning during the pandemic, and those learning opportunities were of lower quality. In a newly published study, Penn Graduate School of Education’s Sharon Wolf, along with her co-authors, analyzes data gathered from phone-based surveys of children, their primary caregiver, and teachers throughout the pandemic about their experiences with remote schooling. And while the data is specific to Ghana, their findings offer opportunities for reflection in many countries as students read just to learning in person.

On July 28, 2021 the University of Pennsylvania launched the Fueling Business Growth campaign, a new supplier diversity and inclusion initiative strategically enhancing a long-held priority to provide local, diverse, and minority-owned enterprises with increased opportunities to conduct business with Penn.