The Fels Policy Research Initiative (FPRI) has announced nine working groups and conferences it will fund through the end of 2017.
Launched by Penn Arts and Sciences in 2016, FPRI seeks to increase the visibility and impact of the University’s policy-relevant research by supporting research and working groups, sponsoring events and seminars, and giving faculty opportunities to voice their opinion on important policy issues. Funding prioritizes working groups and conferences that engage faculty from Penn Arts and Sciences and involve multiple disciplines.
The funded working groups include Foundations of Cooperative Organization in Living Systems: Sustaining Research in Theoretical Biology. In this project, Vijay Balasubramanian, Cathy and Mark Lasry Professor of Physics, and Junhyong Kim, Patricia M. Williams Term Professor of Biology, will bring together faculty, fellows, and students to explore the need for a fundamentally new way of viewing and understanding living systems as interacting across scales from molecules to societies and species. Other working groups funded by FPRI include an investigation of social and ecological inequalities in the built environment and a partnership between Philadelphia teachers and Penn graduate students and faculty to make the case for fully funding Philadelphia’s schools.
FPRI is also funding a conference on race, science, and society in April 2018, which will interrogate the global variability of race in science across time and space. This two-day international symposium will be organized by Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science; and Sarah Tishkoff, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology, and hosted by the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Other conferences funded by FPRI include one focusing on organized violence and Afro-descendant populations.
