From “Penn Today”
at
The University of Pennsylvania
12.5.22
Kristina García – Writer
Eric Sucar – Photographer
From Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall to the Schuylkill River four researchers share their science and their spaces.
Clockwise from top left, Alice Kate Li, Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Erick Gagne, and Scott Poethig introduce their campus research workspaces.
Laia Mogas-Soldevila is surrounded by possibilities—leather made from plants, ribbons of lattice that can filter air, sand structures that could replace concrete and rebar. She and the research team at DumoLab are experimenting with architecture using biomaterials that are healthy for humans and sustainable for the planet. Mogas-Soldevila is one of four researchers who share their science and their spaces in the fourth installment of People and Places at Penn.
From robotics on the Schuylkill River to chronic wasting disease in Pennsylvania woodlands to a basement grow chamber near the BioPond, these individuals are searching for new ways to understand wildlife ecology, environmental engineering, sustainable architecture, and plant biology.
Laia Mogas-Soldevila, DumoLab
Laia Mogas-Soldevila’s office is a modern-day curiosity cabinet. Seed pods, feathers, cocoons, and barnacles coexist alongside science fiction offerings: a translucent, shell-like substance that curls up and stretches out again without cracking, a pink-and-orange, hexagonal-patterned fabric that feels like high-sheen leather, and a perforated, plastic-looking material with a snakeskin motif. But of course, nothing here is plastic or leather. It’s all biomaterials, reverse-engineered to make everyday objects that will biodegrade after they’ve fulfilled their purpose.
Laia Mogas-Soldevila in Meyerson Hall’s studio space looks up through “performative beacons,” student projects using lightweight natural materials.
Mogas-Soldevila is assistant professor of graduate architecture at the Weitzman School of Design and her work explores material design. Using nature as inspiration, Mogas-Soldevila repurposes biomaterials to form everyday objects out of silk, cellulose, sand, and shrimp skins—everything is fair game, as long as it’s biodegradable.
“Everything that we do is water-based,” Mogas-Soldevila says. “You, any human, is assembled in a water-based environment, in our mother’s womb. All this water-based fabrication already happens in nature, all the time.”
Her lab has created a water-based gel that feels like plastic when it dries, but will degrade when it gets wet again. The hope is that this material could replace petroleum-based products, Mogas-Soldevila says. “It’s the plastic bag that you can use a couple of days and then the third day, it’s almost cracked.”
Mogas-Soldevila, a newly appointed professor at the Weitzman School of Design, creates biomaterials for architectural use, merging design with science. “If it was not beautiful, we would not do it,” she says.
Originally from Spain, Mogas-Soldevila’s first advanced degree was in architecture. But she graduated during a construction crisis, she says. “I had to change gears. What else was out there?”
Mogas-Soldevila earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. working within a biomedical engineering lab, integrating biology and design at Tufts University, and two Master of Science degrees in design computation and digital fabrication from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Now at Penn, “my intent is to bring it all back to architecture,” Mogas-Soldevila says. She wants to scale up, making these materials affordable, durable, and accessible. Her DumoLab Research group, housed in Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall, is a room with 3-D printers and Hobart mixers that looks like a mix of an industrial bakery, an art studio, and a technology lab.
Everything DumoLab makes has to have aesthetic value. “If it was not beautiful, we would not do it,” Mogas-Soldevila says. She’s exploring materials that could replace leather, both in upholstery and in clothing, and alternatives for construction material, like concrete.
Together with a team of Penn undergraduates, Mogas-Soldevila will spend her summer building a dome structure from their new “concrete,” which has the color and texture of earth, a substance made not only of sand, but also biopolymers from shrimp shells, algae, calcium, and corn, along with natural fibers like flax, bamboo, and burlap. It looks like caramelized sugar and weighs like lead.
And, like everything else, the concrete substitute is water soluble. “If it comes in, it must go back to Earth without toxicity. And that’s a challenge,” Mogas-Soldevila says. A “decade, multi-decade challenge. That’s why it’s difficult. But it’s going to be very rewarding if we get there.”
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Scott Poethig, Poethig Lab
Scott Poethig in his office overlooking the BioPond.
Born on the windy shores of Lake Erie in Buffalo, New York, Scott Poethig was quickly whisked away to tropical Manila by his parents, both Presbyterian missionaries. They wanted to immerse their son in Filipino culture and society, enrolling him in a local school. “In our biology class, when we had to dissect a frog, we had to bring the frog,” Poethig says.
For the last 40 years, Poethig has found a home at Penn as the John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of plant biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. He studies the transition between juvenile and adult development—everything from birth to puberty.
“Almost every aspect of the plant changes during the juvenile-to-adult transition,” Poethig says. “But, for many years, the vast majority of plant biologists didn’t know that [this transition] exists and certainly didn’t believe it was important.”
Poethig in one grow chamber filled with Arabidopsis thaliana (left) and in his laboratory (right).
As it turns out, this transition controls many other processes, Poethig says. Photosynthetic efficiency differs, disease resistance varies, and almost every aspect of the shape of a plant—from its branching pattern to leaf shape—is differentially expressed in a juvenile plant, compared to its mature state.
Poethig discovered which gene controls maturation—a piece of small RNA called miR156. A large presence of miR156 suppresses the adult genes during the juvenile phase. When miR156 decreases, plants transition to the adult stage. Environmental impacts affect this as well, he says. Shade, for instance, delays the process.
Since 2006, Poethig has conducted his research at the Carolyn Lynch Laboratory, where ceiling-height glass windows look out onto Kaskey Park and the BioPond, framing a panoply of native species and their horticultural guests. In the fall, asters and toad lilies bloom in the understory. Tulip popular leaves yellow and fall, wafting down to rest on the understory.
Here, Poethig, three post-doctoral students, and one undergraduate conduct experiments on Arabidopsis thaliana, an inconspicuous, weedy-looking plant that, upon maturation, shoots up a flowering, foot-long stalk from a cluster of serrated leaves—and promptly dies.
With A. thaliana, the team is currently studying what Poethig calls “the master regulator of the final switch—reproduction.”
Every organism, both plants and animals, go through two major changes: somatic, or body change, and reproductive maturation, he says. “One of the big questions is, what is the relationship between vegetative phase change—the type of leaves the plant makes—and reproductive competence?”
People assume that physical maturation and reproductive competence are part of the same process, Poethig says, meaning that a plant will flower when it looks like an adult. “That’s what’s been assumed in plants for over 100 years,” he says. At Lynch Laboratory, results from the A. thaliana experiments show that these two processes are independently regulated. While miR156 controls many aspects of plant development, it does not inhibit reproduction.
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Alice Kate Li, Underwater Weather
Alice Kate Li (center) and her six member team work on deploying the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with an on-board sensor suite, designed and tested with Yue Mao, Sixuan Liu, Sandeep Manjanna, Jasleen Dhanoa, Bharg Mehta, and Torrie Edwards, using a pulley system.
On an early morning in late October, Alice Kate Li and five teammates bundle up in hats and coats and head down to the river to deploy a 45-pound robot. The project, called Underwater Weather, uses an autonomous surface vehicle kitted out with flame-red kayak pontoons to collect data on river sediment and flow dynamics, along with riverbed structure, tidal cycles, and storm flooding.
While it may look static, the Schuylkill River is tidally influenced, with about a five-foot difference between high-tide and low-tide, says Li, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences who works on Underwater Weather. The project is part of the ScalAR Lab at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab, housed in the Pennovation Center.
Information the Underwater Weather team gathers could allow them to predict the impact of floods on urban infrastructure (like bridges and piers), the river ecosystem, and drinking water quality. “With all this data that we’re collecting, we should be able to model the dynamics—but also then extrapolate to make predictions on environmental changes, while climate change causes more frequent tornadoes and hurricanes, and therefore floods,” Li says.
(Left) Ph.D. candidate Victoria Edwards in a kayak, who follows the ASV during deployments, receives tools from Jeremy Wang, a design and mechatronics engineer for the GRASP Lab. (Right) Li sets up the monitoring system.
True to the GRASP Lab’s collaborative nature, the Underwater Weather team is working with Douglas Jerolmack and Hugo Ulloa in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, who will use the amalgamated data to better understand river dynamics. “I really want my work to be impactful,” Li says. “I would love to take this data and, in the future, find out it is valuable for understanding the potential impacts of climate change.”
Originally from the south of England, Li spent her high school years in Hong Kong before moving to California for college. She spent two years at a community college before heading to the University of California, Irvine to study mechanical engineering. Now in her third year of the electrical and systems engineering doctoral program at Penn, Li is working on active sensing—creating robots that can make autonomous decisions in real time while they’re out in the field.
The GRASP Lab is a great place to do this work, she says. “I think a lot of it is the people, the environment as well—it’s highly collaborative and welcoming.”
The Lab’s large open space facilitates conversation, Li says. Everyone is “happy to discuss ideas that probably have nothing to do with their research,” she says, which makes students feel connected to others and their work.
Doctoral work can be lonely, Li says. “You can feel like, ‘Oh, what did I get myself into?’ But this kind of environment allows for people to stay sane, to stay motivated and inspired.”
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Roderick B. Gagne, Wildlife Futures Program
Roderick “Erick” B. Gagne on the New Bolton Center campus in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. (Image: Hannah Kleckner Hall)
It’s autumn at the School of Veterinary Medicine’s New Bolton Center in Kennett Square and the rolling hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania transmuted into a tapestry of green and gold, if only for a few weeks. Placid cows dot the hills, hemmed in by white fences. A murmuration of starlings undulates in the sky.
Tucked off a gravel road on is the Wildlife Futures Program, which operates out of a stone farmhouse from 1792 and works in partnership with the Pennsylvania Game Commission on disease surveillance, management, and research in wildlife populations across the state.
The program works on a variety of diseases, including chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal neurological illness that affects a variety of members of the deer family and is transmitted by animal-to-animal contact, including through saliva, feces, and carcasses. The illness is caused by misfolded proteins, called prions. There is currently no vaccine, no treatment, and no cure. Once CWD is established, it can spread within area herds.
The Wildlife Futures team uses the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect protease-resistant proteins—a trait characteristic of prions—in CWD, says Roderick “Erick” B. Gagne, assistant professor of wildlife disease ecology. If positive, they administer an immunohistochemistry (IHC) screening, where a pathologist looks at a trimmed and stained piece of tissue under a microscope to look for look for evidence of binding with a prion-specific antibody. “That’s the gold standard,” Gagne says
Gagne works at his desk (left) and monitors test results (right). (Images: Hannah Kleckner Hall)
The team is also experimenting with the real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-Quic) test, which is more sensitive than ELISA, Gagne says—similar to a real-time COVID PCR test.
“The potential is for early detection of CWD,” he says. “We’re looking at where the prion is in animals in the wild, and then trying to address, or start to think about, how it’s getting there.”
Pennsylvania’s deer hunting season is their busiest time of year. The 27-member team spends months gearing up, hiring additional staff and buying lab equipment and supplies. By the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, it’s all hands on deck, says Gagne. The program processes thousands of samples per week, he says, each from separately tagged white-tailed deer.
To do so, the Wildlife Futures Program works collaboratively with management agencies, developing research questions together and applying novel approaches to find solutions. “Disease is becoming increasingly recognized as something that wildlife management agencies need to deal with,” Gagne says. “I envision this academic and state agency partnership only increasing. It’s a really good roadmap to actively solve urgent and immediate issues.”
Gagne is a new hire, not quite two years into his position, which he accepted just before the birth of his first child. With a full beard and a quiet demeanor, Gagne is here to put down roots, to help mold the program’s future. It has “a real, tangible feeling—like your work is making a difference,” he says. “It’s kind of exciting to see just how quickly it can take shape. And then having that happening at a university like Penn just really leverages the potential of what we can do.”
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Academic life at University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.
Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.
The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.
Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).
Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. In 2019, the university had an endowment of $14.65 billion, the sixth-largest endowment of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of $1.02 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.
As of 2018, distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include three U.S. Supreme Court justices; 32 U.S. senators; 46 U.S. governors; 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); 24 members of the Continental Congress; 14 foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States, including Donald Trump. As of October 2019, 36 Nobel laureates; 80 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 64 billionaires; 29 Rhodes Scholars; 15 Marshall Scholars and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.
History
The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.
In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale Unversity, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.
Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.
The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.
Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).
After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.
Research, innovations and discoveries
Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.
Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia University and Cornell University (Harvard University did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale University) and tenth nationally.
In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.
Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.
Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
ENIAC UPenn
It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.
Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.
International partnerships
Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics(UK), University of Barcelona [Universitat de Barcelona](ES), Paris Institute of Political Studies [Institut d’études politiques de Paris](FR), University of Queensland(AU), University College London(UK), King’s College London(UK), Hebrew University of Jerusalem(IL) and University of Warwick(UK).
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