Petryna Honored for Contribution to Anthropology

Adriana Petryna, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Anthropology, has been awarded the biennial Wellcome Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for “a body of published work which makes, as a whole, a significant contribution to research in anthropology as applied to medical problems.”

Petryna specializes in the social and political dimensions of science and medicine in the United States and Eastern Europe, focusing particularly on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and on clinical research and pharmaceutical globalization. Her concerns center on public and private forms of scientific knowledge production, as well as on the role of science and technology in public policy, particularly in contexts of crisis, inequality, and political transition. This includes the social nature of scientific knowledge, how populations are enrolled in scientific experimentation, and what becomes of citizenship and ethics in that process.

Petryna is the author of When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects and of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, which won the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology and the Sharon Stephens First Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society. She has coedited When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health with Joao Biehl, and Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices, with Andrew Lakoff and Arthur Kleinman.

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology—the study of humankind—in its broadest and most inclusive sense.

Arts & Sciences News

Hanming Fang Named Inaugural Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics

An applied microeconomist who integrates rigorous modeling with data analysis, Fang’s research within the field of public economics focuses on health insurance and healthcare markets.

View Article >
Xi Song Named Inaugural Schiffman Family Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology

Song’s research interests include social mobility, occupations, Asian Americans, population studies, and quantitative methodology.

View Article >
Julie Nelson Davis Named Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of History of Art

Davis specializes in the arts and material cultures of 18th- and 19th-century Japan, with a focus on prints, paintings, and illustrated books.

View Article >
Justin Khoury Named Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Khoury’s research interests lie at the intersection of particle physics and cosmology.

View Article >
University of Pennsylvania, Neubauer Family Foundation, and Philadelphia Police Department Partner to Support Police Leadership Education

The first-of-its-kind graduate degree in the U.S. for police leaders launches this fall at the School of Arts & Sciences.

View Article >
Professor of Biology Philip Rea Wins Neal Award for Scientific Journalism

Rea won for the award for Best Technical/Scientific Content for his article “Gliflozins for Diabetes: From Bark to Bench to Bedside,” published in American Scientist.

View Article >