"The time has come to lower the barriers that separate departments and schools. Discipline must reach across to discipline and build bridges of common understanding and shared purpose across all 12 of Penn’s schools and throughout the campus."
Penn President Amy Gutmann
As the challenges of our time grow more complex and consequential, Penn is poised like no other to innovate and lead. Through the recruitment of faculty who cross disciplinary boundaries, Penn fosters innovation and expands the world’s knowledge in new and unanticipated ways. Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professors hold appointments in two or more schools at Penn, and draw on their breadth of knowledge to collaborate with colleagues on boundary-breaking research.
With 12 schools on one contiguous campus, our world-class faculty – especially PIK Professors – are masterful collaborators. As they pursue their path-breaking work, they bring knowledge together across disciplines and use that knowledge to illuminate some of the most fundamental issues of our time.
Kevin Johnson, who has appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication, will become the David L. Cohen University Professor.
A new Penn Medicine study finds that suppressing key exhaustion genes may allow CAR T cell treatments to be used much more effectively against pancreatic and other solid cancers.
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.
The Community Collaboratory for Co-Creation, led by Penn Nursing and Penn Engineering, will focus on research, education, and community engagement and outreach.
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.
Rather than causing a backlash, vaccination requirements will succeed at getting more people inoculated, according to research from PIK Professor Dolores Albarracín and colleagues at Penn.