Penn Arts & Sciences in the News

Hanming Fang, Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics, discusses new research examining how high-speed rail expansion has boosted electric vehicle adoption across China. The link is likely a “happy coincidence,” says Fang, but one with lessons for countries like the United States.

Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, offers five key insights from her new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, including how having choices makes us feel free and how having so many choices can have negative repercussions. 

Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Shannon Mattern describes the appeal of this type of ladder. “You not only have to use your hands to turn the page, but in this case you have to get down off the ladder, physically slide the thing—your whole body has to move. It’s kind of like a scaling up of the analog engagement with the book.” 

Josef Wegner, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, discusses the importance of the discovery. “It really cements the importance of Hatshepsut in anchoring the Valley of the Kings going forward,” he says. Hatshepsut took the thrown after the death of her husband Thutmose II. 

Rogers M. Smith, professor emeritus of political science, discusses automatic birthright citizenship, including for the children of undocumented immigrants, in light of recent court filings from the Trump administration. 

Melissa Hunt, Associate Director of Clinical Training, said such tools might be effective initially “but overall, technology solutions to technology problems are always going to be inherently problematic.”

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, was profiled in TIME as part of the series “The Closers 2025” about 25 Black leaders working to end the racial equity gap. Roberts advocates for something better than child-protective services. “This is not a system that supports families,” she says. “It’s really a system that terrorizes families and tears them apart.”

Irma Elo, Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor, commented on the recent removal of certain pages and datasets from federal health websites. “The government should restore all the data that had been previously collected and make it available,” she noted. “You cannot just replace it without having a huge influx of resources.” 

According to research from the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, scheduling time blocks with breaks to complete different tasks can help achieve the goals of a to-do list.

“She appears ready to wield more of the power that she seemed rather reluctant to embrace in her first stay at the White House,” says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor, who curated the exhibition “Every Eye is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States” at The National Portrait Gallery in 2020. “And yet, she has positioned herself firmly behind that ultra shiny table, keeping a bit of a boundary.” 

A study from Mathew Madhavacheril, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and graduate student Joshua Kim revealed that the distribution of matter in the cosmos is less clumpy than expected. “What we found was that, for the most part, the story of structure formation is remarkably consistent with the predictions from Einstein’s gravity,” says Madhavacheril. 

Associate Professor of History Brent Cebul argues that President Biden spent too much time on efforts that American workers wouldn’t feel for years. “The time horizon associated with those big pieces of legislation was way out of sync with the exigencies of the presidential election,” Cebul says.