$10 Million NINDS Grant to Penn Medicine and Other Researchers to Investigate TBI and Dementia Link
An international team of researchers led by Penn Medicine will investigate the link between traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) over the next five years with a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Using an extensive tissue bank that includes over 1,000 samples, the researchers aim to uncover the underlying biological mechanisms of TBI-related neurodegeneration (TReND) from a variety of brain injury types. Researchers hope that by understanding TReND, they might gain further insight into how ADRD develops, which would inform the development of better preventative measures and treatments.
“We know that brain injuries increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and they provide a unique opportunity to study neurodegeneration, as the imaging and cognitive testing required for their diagnosis provide a ‘baseline’ to compare to over time,” said co-principal investigator Douglas H. Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and a professor of neurosurgery at Penn. “By studying the effects of injuries over time, we hope to understand what happens biologically and structurally to the brain after injury that leads to neurodegeneration, and we hope that those findings also tell us how ADRD develop in general, even in individuals without a previous brain injury.”
This grant will support a new initiative called Transdisciplinary Research Accelerating Neuropathology Studies and Facilitating Open Research Methods in TBI (TRANSFORM-TBI). In addition to expanding the tissue and imaging archives from the first phase, TRANSFORM-TBI will use samples to investigate why any TBI increases the risk of ADRD, even though brain injuries can vary widely from person to person. Researchers also aim to identify any factors that might increase the risk for developing ADRD.
The team of 26 investigators across 12 sites aims to uncover the type and extent of neuropathological changes that emerge after TBI. They will evaluate the pathologies from a variety of types of TBI, which could range from a single, severe injury, like from a car accident, to mild, repetitive injuries, which can occur while playing a contact sport. The team will also look at TBI that results from military combat and intimate partner violence.
“Brain injuries vary widely from person to person, which can make it difficult to understand how they are associated with neurodegenerative disease later in life,” said co-principal investigator Edward B. Lee, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine. “By evaluating samples from different types of TBI and TBI with different causes, we hope to illuminate which types of brain injuries increase the risk of ADRD most, and hopefully use this information to tailor clinical trials for therapies to individuals’ specific brain injuries.”
TRANSFORM-TBI is the second phase of research to study TReND. In 2019, Drs. Smith and Lee and Willie Stewart of the University of Glasgow, U.K., established CONNECT-TBI—a program spanning 12 institutions to establish diagnostic criteria for TReND. To date, CONNECT-TBI has gathered clinical data sets and tissue archives from over 1,000 cases across participating centers.
TRANSFORM-TBI is primarily a collaboration between the Perelman School of Medicine and the University of Glasgow. It is supported by two NIH institutes, the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke and the National Institute of Aging.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: Inaugural Faculty Director of the Arthur Ross Gallery
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has been named the Arthur Ross Gallery’s inaugural faculty director, effective June 1, 2024.
“This is an exciting day for Penn’s arts and culture community and the future of the Arthur Ross Gallery, as we look to strengthen the gallery’s unique identity on our campus and its role in engaging our faculty and students, advancing our academic mission, and providing a vital hub of art practice and education,” said Provost John L. Jackson Jr. “Gwendolyn is the ideal leader to bring together the work of the gallery with our missions of research, teaching, and learning in these ways.”
Dr. Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the history of art department in the School of Arts & Sciences. A renowned scholar and teacher of American art who has been at Penn for almost 20 years, Dr. Shaw is also a highly experienced curator. She has served as senior historian, director of research, publications, and scholarly programs, and acting chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, and has been the faculty curator of shows at the Arthur Ross Gallery (ARG), the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Penn Museum. She has curated and/or been the primary editor of catalogues on dozens of major shows, including Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Every Eye is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States, and a forthcoming exhibition as part of America’s 250th birthday celebrations in 2026 at the Arthur Ross Gallery. She is also the author of the books The Art of Remembering: Essays on Black Art and History and Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, as well as numerous major essays and reviews.
“As the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery, I plan to foster creativity and critical thinking, providing a platform for individual expression and a welcoming space for collective learning,” said Dr. Shaw. “I see the Ross as a unique space on campus where we can lift up the work of Penn’s world-class faculty, students, and alumni, as well as showcase beautiful objects and present challenging conceptual projects from across time and around the world.”
Dr. Shaw will work closely with ARG director of exhibitions and curatorial affairs Emily Zimmerman on initiatives that will expand the gallery’s dynamic presence on campus. Dr. Shaw’s appointment to this role advances In Principle and Practice, the University’s strategic framework, accelerating interdisciplinary activities and expanding opportunities for Penn to create, exhibit, study, and research the arts across campus and in Philadelphia.
Ala Stanford: Professor of Practice in School of Arts & Sciences with Appointments in Annenberg & SP2
Ala Stanford, a national leader in health equity, a healthcare policy advisor, and the former mid-Atlantic regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has joined the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of practice in the department of biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, with additional appointments as director of community outreach for research activities in the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and as a research associate in the Annenberg School for Communication.
A practicing physician for more than 20 years and founder of R.E.A.L. Concierge Medicine, Dr. Stanford is board-certified by the American Board of Surgery in both pediatric and adult general surgery. She is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Dr. Stanford gained international recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic when she used the infrastructure of her pediatric surgery practice to create a grassroots organization, the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, focused on education, testing, contact tracing, and vaccination in communities lacking access to care and resources. She and her team provided direct care for hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia residents and her organization’s message went nationwide. Dr. Stanford then opened a multidisciplinary ambulatory care center bearing her name in Allegheny West, a neighborhood in Philadelphia with one of the lowest life expectancies in the city. Soon thereafter, Dr. Stanford was appointed mid-Atlantic regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President Biden, where she served for a year before resuming her role at her care center.
As a professor of practice in Penn’s department of biology, Dr. Stanford will teach undergraduates about the intersection of health, equity, and biology. “Dr. Stanford has led a life of remarkable accomplishments,” said Steven J. Fluharty, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “She is a force for innovation and improvement, and she will share her knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm with our students, connecting their studies in the lab and lecture hall to the world they will be working in and making better.”
Nobel laureate Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in the Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, said, “I have worked with Ala for quite a while and having her as part of the Penn community will greatly enhance the effectiveness of the various projects we work on. She will also be an incredible resource for teaching our future leaders.” As the institute’s director of community outreach for research activities, Dr. Stanford will research the barriers that exist for vaccine uptake.
Moreover, as a research associate in the Annenberg School for Communication, Dr. Stanford will use information gained from this research to create messaging that promotes vaccinations and health. “We are so fortunate to have Dr. Stanford join our intellectual community here at Penn,” said Sarah Banet-Weiser, Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School and the Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. “Working at the vital intersections of health equality and social justice, her tireless efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic and her continued important work in addressing health disparities in Black communities have been nothing short of remarkable. At Annenberg, we are particularly excited to work with her on a variety of communication practices regarding health, community, and equity.”
Dr. Stanford’s awards and honors include being named a Top 10 CNN Hero, one of Fortune magazine’s “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” and one of Forbes’ Most Influential Women. She has also received the American College of Surgeons 2023 Domestic Surgical Volunteerism Award and the George H.W. Bush Points of Light Award. She is a medical and health correspondent for national media outlets. Her book, Take Care of Them Like My Own: Faith, Fortitude, and a Surgeon’s Fight for Health Justice, will be published in August by Simon & Schuster. Part memoir and part manifesto of health equality and justice, it offers urgent lessons about the power of communities working together to take care of one another and the importance of fighting for a healthcare system that truly fulfills its promise to all Americans.
Simon Richter: Class of 1965 Term Professor of German
Simon Richter, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures in the School of Arts & Sciences, has been named the Class of 1965 Term Professor of German. Dr. Richter’s research focuses on cultural aspects of the climate emergency in Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. As an environmental humanist, Dr. Richter engages in activities that blur distinctions between traditional scholarship, urban design, and environmental activism. He was instrumental in establishing the Penn 1.5 Minute Climate Lectures and Climate Week at Penn. With professor of fine arts Joshua Mosley, Dr. Richter directs the Penn Animation as Research Lab, which produces the popular Project Poldergeist series of videos about climate adaptation in the Netherlands. Dr. Richter is a faculty fellow of Perry World House and of the Penn Institute of Urban Research, is a faculty advisory board member of the Water Center at Penn, and is affiliated with Cinema & Media Studies and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. His teaching has been recognized with the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Dennis M. DeTurck Award for Innovation in Teaching.
The Class of 1965 Term Chairs were established in 1990 in honor of its 25th Reunion—one for each of the four undergraduate schools and one in honor of the College for Women.
Marcia Chatelain, Bakirathi Mani, Letícia Marteleto, and Shannon Mattern: Presidential Penn Compact Professors
Four faculty members in the School of Arts & Sciences have been named Presidential Penn Compact Professors.
Marcia Chatelain, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, researches issues in African American history, including African American migration, women’s and girls’ history, and race and food. Her latest book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, among numerous other honors. The book examines the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast-food industry. She is also the author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, which encompasses women’s and girls’ history and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, as well as black capitalism. In 2016, The Chronicle of Higher Education named Dr. Chatelain a Top Influencer in academia in recognition of her social media campaign #FergusonSyllabus. Dr. Chatelain has held an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at New America, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Bakirathi Mani is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English and a core faculty member in the Asian American studies program. Her areas of interest include Asian American, American, and South Asian Studies; visual cultural studies; museum and curatorial studies; postcolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer of color theory; and interdisciplinary methods of research in comparative race and ethnic studies. Dr. Mani’s book, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America, earned an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2022. The book considers how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America. She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America. More recently, she has written on the circulation of photographs of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic and on photography’s relation to imperial and settler-colonial archives in the U.S. and South Asia. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University and Columbia University.
Letícia Marteleto, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of sociology, is a social demographer who uses data, cultural knowledge, and sociological theory to understand inequality and its intersections with fertility, education, and health. Her work is motivated by the central question of how social and economic disadvantages and demographic change intertwine in low- and middle-income countries with persistently high levels of inequality at times when widely held social and demographic norms are in flux. In her latest research, Dr. Marteleto has examined how structural shocks like the Zika and COVID-19 novel infectious disease crises impact women’s lives. She is currently the principal investigator of DZC (Demographic Consequences of Epidemics in Brazil), funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Dr. Marteleto’s research has also been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. She is a research affiliate of Penn’s Population Studies Center and a faculty member in the graduate group in demography.
Shannon Mattern has joined Penn’s department of cinema & media studies as a Presidential Penn Compact Professor. She previously served on the faculty in both Penn’s department of anthropology and at the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York. Dr. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of four books, including A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, which won the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Ecology of Culture and the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. Dr. Mattern’s research has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, most recently the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, which she will hold in 2025.
Julia Lynch: Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation
Provost John L. Jackson. Jr. and deputy provost Beth A. Winkelstein have announced the appointment of Julia Lynch, a professor of political science, as faculty co-director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CETLI), beginning July 1, 2024.
“Julia Lynch has long been one of the most engaged and inventive teachers at Penn,” said Provost Jackson. “She is a pioneer of active learning and inclusive teaching who brings to this new role her strong commitments to pedagogical innovation, disability-sensitive teaching, cross-disciplinary outreach, and mentoring and training of graduate students. She will be an invaluable partner in shaping the future of teaching and learning at the new CETLI.”
Dr. Lynch, who has taught at Penn since 2001, is a global expert on the politics of public health, social policy, and inequality. She is the author of Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth (2020) and Age in the Welfare State: The Origins of Social Spending on Pensioners, Workers, and Children (2006), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Section, and is a co-author of Ageing and Health: The Politics of Better Policies (2021) and The Unequal Pandemic: COVID-19 and Health Inequalities (2021), which was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Pandemic by the New Statesman and received the Richard Titmuss Book Award from the Social Policy Association.
Dr. Lynch served from 2020 to 2024 as co-director of Penn’s Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies and serves on the advisory boards of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the Italian Studies Program, and the bioethics minor. She is an expert advisor to the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, a past chair of the Health Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association, and a past treasurer of the Council for European Studies. She received a PhD and MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB in government magna cum laude from Harvard University.
CETLI was formed in 2023, through the merger of the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Online Learning Initiative, to promote teaching excellence and innovation, enhance the learning experiences of all students and learners at Penn, and extend the quality and reach of a Penn education.
Modupe Coker: Assistant Dean of Clinical and Translational Research at Penn Dental Medicine
After a national search, Penn Dental Medicine has welcomed Modupe Coker as assistant dean of clinical and translational research and as an associate professor with tenure in the department of basic and translational sciences. Her faculty appointment took effect July 1, and she will transition into both roles full-time starting August 1. In her role as assistant dean, Dr. Coker will lead the school’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) and support the growing research portfolio of Penn Dental Medicine.
“We believe Dr. Coker’s experience supporting research activities across disciplines will be a tremendous resource here at Penn Dental Medicine,” said Mark S. Wolff, the Morton Amsterdam Dean of Penn Dental Medicine. “We are excited to have her bring her leadership to the CCTR team.”
Dr. Coker comes to Penn Dental Medicine from Rutgers University’s School of Dental Medicine, where she had served as an assistant professor of oral biology since 2019. While at Rutgers, Dr. Coker established a research program and mentored more than 20 master’s and doctoral-level students. She also served as a university-wide program director and was heavily involved in mentorship programs. While at Rutgers, Dr. Coker also held concurrent adjunct faculty appointments in clinical instruction at multiple institutions.
Dr. Coker’s research focuses on characterizing the effect of early-life infections (including HIV/AIDS) and behavioral and environmental factors on microbial composition in the context of oral/dental disease. Her lab is currently funded through three NIH grants focusing on HIV-associated oral microbiome and pediatric clinical studies related to caries, oral HPV persistence, and infant gut microbiome. By investigating shifts in the microbiome, she hopes to understand how its modulation might present an important therapeutic target to improving overall health, particularly in young children. In addition, she is motivated by questions related to disease causality and the rigorous epidemiologic methods used to address them.
Dr. Coker holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (2015), a master of public health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (2007), and a bachelor of dental surgery from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (2004).
Penn Hosts 2024 College Horizons Program for Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native High School Students
Nearly 100 Native American high school students from 19 states representing 33 Tribal Nations from across North America, Alaska Native villages, and Hawaiian Islands visited Penn’s campus June 22-28 to take part in College Horizons 2024.
The nationwide program prepares Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian high school sophomores and juniors to pursue higher education via culturally-sustaining college advising programs. This was the third time Penn hosted the program.
“We [were] thrilled to share our community with the students of College Horizons,” said Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions Whitney Soule. “In addition to providing high school sophomores and juniors with a comprehensive program to prepare them for college applications, this week [gave] us a chance to show off our community of problem solvers, thinkers, and connectors at Penn.”
During the week-long program, the students—30% of whom are the first generation in their families to consider college and who came from 67 different high schools—worked with nearly 60 faculty members and admissions representatives from across the country to learn about the college admissions process. Students left with not only the knowledge necessary to navigate applying to college, but also a network of individuals ready to assist them. Students traveled to Philadelphia from twenty different U.S. states.
“Our organization is deeply committed to preparing, celebrating and empowering Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students to become educated on all aspects of the college admissions and financial aid process,” said College Horizons executive director Carmen Lopez. “We do this by offering summer admissions ‘crash courses’ focused on demystifying the college application process and exploring college options. Our program is designed to be fun, challenging, and vastly rewarding for participants, and we’re thrilled to [return] to the Penn community once again.”
College Horizons’s mission of working with Native students is borne out by its success rate—99% of participants attended a four-year university and of those, 85% graduate within five years.
The June program included small group sessions for students as well as an opening ceremony, a Penn information session, a college fair, a traditional night—where students shared their diverse cultures through song, dance, and talk—and a closing session.