"I'm excited about being able to spend my time working on the problems I find most interesting and challenging," shares John Sperger, a Post-Baccalaureate Studies student. After spending three years as a consultant at IBM and two years as the Senior Research Coordinator for the Operations, Information and Decisions Department at Wharton, John is starting a PhD in Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina in the fall of 2017.

Marc Hummel (MLA ’17), a content marketing creator, used his Master of Liberal Arts capstone project to explore why framing ideas as viruses doesn’t help influencers understand how ideas spread. Furthermore, he wrote that the “viral” model doesn’t tell individuals and organizations what they can do to make an idea spread.

During a summer internship, Master of Liberal Arts graduate Jonathan Singleton (‘17) helped photograph and research Japanese artifacts given to the Penn Museum by the Tokyo National Museum after the 1893 World’s Fair. A new archaeology class taught by Dr. Yoko Nishimura of the School of Arts & Sciences is built around studying 187 of the ceramic pots, stone tools, and weapons.

Penn’s Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program—which equips students to understand how individuals and groups make decisions, and how to affect those decisions—welcomed its first class of students to campus this August.

“Birds tell us a lot about the environment of which we are also a part,” shares the Director of the Bird Conservation Program at Willistown Conservation Trust and Master of Environmental Studies (MES) lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Lisa Kiziuk (MES ’04). “Half of all migratory birds have declined in the last 50 years, which is an alarming number.

Dr. Sally Willig, a lecturer and advisor in the Master of Environmental Studies (MES) program, recently brought her students on a kayak tour to explore a freshwater tidal marsh in southern New Jersey as part of her wetlands course. Field trips give MES students the unique opportunity to become fully immersed in the diverse ecosystems studied in the program. The course dives into the geological, biological, ecological, and political perspectives on wetlands.

Jesse Raines, a senior majoring in Africana Studies in the LPS Bachelor of Arts program, participated in a grant-funded filmmaking course through Penn Summer Abroad. In partnership with the nonprofit FilmAid, students made documentaries, educational videos, and virtual reality films with residents in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Jesse, an Army veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan, and previously lived and worked in western Africa, taught his classmates key phrases in Swahili.

In a recent piece in the journal Environmental Management, a team including current and former Penn students and staff, used archival materials and aerial photography to provide an account of the past 150 years of thought and effort that went into creating Penn’s current tree canopy. The endeavor was led by Master of Environmental Studies alumna Lara Roman of the US Forest Service.

“It’s a very exciting time to get involved with offshore wind power because it is a nascent industry in the US,” shares Brandon Burke, a graduate research assistant at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and student in the Master of Environmental Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania.

“With each class I take, I find what interests me is the tremendous power that business has in shaping our culture. Especially how much it can do for sustainability,” shares Meg Kramer (‘18—expected), a student in the Master of Environmental Studies (MES) program and former marketing and communications executive in the pharmaceutical industry.