Diversity News

Dorothy Roberts, a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Roberts is the George A. Weiss Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and professor of Africana studies. She is also the founding director of the Program on Race, Science and Society. Roberts has appointments in the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences.

Announcement of the creation of an Office of Religious and Ethnic Inclusion (Title VI). This will be the first of its kind nationally, and is being formed in response to recommendations from the fall 2023 Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, and the May 2024 reports of the University Task Force on Antisemitism and the Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community. 

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.