Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter launches Penn initiative connecting past mayors with future leaders
A summer of research and teaching with Scribe Video Center
A ‘breakthrough’ to restore memory
First-year welcome: ‘Mixing curiosity with creativity’
Paving the way for safer roads
A meeting of the minds drives discovery in the brain
PhilWP Summer Institute gives teachers space to write, reflect, and reimagine learning
Supersonic whale calls and special relativity
Four decades of life in the Quad
A historic quad, made whole again
Featured Events
Penn Bookstore Social
New students can get acquainted with Penn’s comprehensive bookstore—a central hub to shop and hang out—during this New Student Orientation program. Visitors can enjoy music, desserts, and raffle drawings in the second-floor café.
Night at the Rec
Students are invited to kick off the year with Penn Campus Recreation. Attendees can explore all five floors of the Pottruck Health and Fitness Center and learn about the numerous amenities, resources, and activities that Campus Recreation has to offer. Activities include a live DJ, photobooth, smoothie bar, free T-shirts (as supplies last), a canoe competition for second-years in Sheerr Pool, and a Super Smash Bros. tournament hosted by TAP Esports on the 4th floor. Participants can also learn about student employment opportunities. Free and open to Penn students.
Penn Forward
A University-wide initiative to shape Penn’s future
Guided by Penn’s strategic framework, In Principle and Practice, Penn Forward launched in September 2025 with six working groups of faculty, staff, students, and postdoctoral scholars who challenged legacy assumptions and proposed bold, actionable strategies to advance Penn’s mission and strengthen operations.
Penn Forward’s initial nine priority initiatives aim to build trust with those we serve, enable bold discovery, and extend Penn’s geographic reach and impact across a lifetime. Learn more about these initiatives and follow along with Penn Today as Penn continues to drive forward.
Penn’s community engagement progress at the turn of the century
Chapters of Change: Thirty years of life sciences transformation at Penn
How the Quaker Commitment empowered one student to create her path at Penn
Chapters of Change: The blossom of Penn’s professional schools in the 19th century
Penn in the News
Is using autocheck cheating?
Katy Milkman of the Wharton School speaks on how people define rules and standards can wildly vary from person to person. “All of these rules, and our ability to follow them, comes from this needing to adjudicate between them,” Milkman says. “It’s like the classic devil and angel whispering into your ears problem. The devil whispers ‘Go for it! Eat all the Cheetos!’”
Your knee replacement could cost you more than 2X depending on where you live—how hospital ‘mega-mergers’ are impacting regular Americans
“The only sure thing is that a merger will result in higher prices for the merged hospitals, not improved quality,” say Mark Pauly and Lawton Robert Burns, senior fellows at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Opposition to data center construction is rising sharply, survey says
“We find it in places where there is already organized opposition to data centers, [and] where there is not,” says Matthew Levendusky of Annenberg School for Communication, School of Arts & Sciences, and Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Philly VA hospital to take psychedelic mushrooms to clinical trials
Successful early psilocybin trials have “...generated quite a lot of excitement for the treatment-resistant depression field,” says Anna Childress of the Perelman School of Medicine. “But also for things like trauma, post-traumatic stress… obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and substance use disorders, which all have their own version of being stuck.”