Penn law clinic files brief challenging slavery exhibit removal at Independence Park
A University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School clinic filed a brief supporting a preliminary injunction that would halt the removal of a slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in Independence National Historical Park.
Filed in April alongside the Legal Defense Fund, the brief was submitted on behalf of two Pennsylvania organizations: the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and African American walking tour company The Black Journey. The exhibit’s removal — affecting a memorial dedicated to nine people enslaved by George Washington — began in January under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
A federal district court paused the dismantling in February by granting a preliminary injunction. The brief argued that the National Park Service and Department of Interior’s removal of the exhibit was “potentially motivated by a discriminatory purpose.”
LDF assistant counsel Avatara Smith-Carrington told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the “hope” of the amicus brief was to “make clear for the Third Circuit all that’s at stake in terms of the removal of these important pieces of our shared history.”
Smith-Carrington added that the brief examined the impact of the exhibit’s removal as well as the broader implications of “what it means to actually deny people the ability to interact with information about the truth about our nation’s founding.”
The brief also described the exhibit’s removal as an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which “stipulates the ways in which federal agencies may make and enforce regulations.”
According to Smith-Carrington, the measure was intended to show how the National Park Service’s actions following the executive order “quickly moved to begin to target and identify” sites that focused on the “contributions of Black people to this country.”
“It is kind of concerning that we would see an agency move so quickly to remove these important parts from our shared history without thought to the impact that it would have on the public,” they added.
Read more from Moukthikadevi Kanakala’s reporting at the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Penn Carey Law professor to receive award honoring civil rights work
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Cara McClellan is set to receive an award in honor of her civil rights work this weekend.
McClellan, the director of the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic, was nominated for The Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia’s 2026 Presidential Award of Courage. The organization — which has served Philadelphia’s Black legal community for 76 years — will honor McClellan at its annual gala on May 2.
“I am honored that Barrister’s President Samantha Fitzpatrick has chosen to recognize my work as Director of ARC Justice Clinic,” McClellan wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The Barristers’ Association described McClellan as a “distinguished civil rights attorney, scholar, and educator” in its award announcement. The statement pointed to her work at the justice clinic and contributions to The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund.
“McClellan leads impactful civil rights litigation and prepares the next generation of advocates to challenge systemic inequities,” the organization wrote.
McClellan joined Penn’s faculty in 2022 and founded the ARC Justice Clinic in February 2023.
“The clinic provides pro bono representation to Philadelphia residents,” McClellan wrote to the DP. “Our advocacy is done in collaboration with grassroots organizations and individuals on the frontline of the fight for racial justice.”
Penn students can become involved with the clinic’s work. Participants gain “hands-on experience working in civil rights litigation and policy advocacy in the Philadelphia region using a movement lawyering approach,” according to its webpage.
“Every day I am inspired by our clients’ perseverance and the deep commitment of our students to working for social justice,” McClellan added.
Penn professor Ala Stanford, consortium of Black doctors breaks ground on Philadelphia imaging center
Penn Biology professor Ala Stanford broke ground on a new imaging center in North Philadelphia on Monday.
The specialized healthcare facility is sponsored by the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium at the Dr. Ala Stanford Center for Health Equity, two organizations founded by Stanford. The center will provide direct access to diagnostic services — including ultrasounds, mammography, computed tomography scans, and X-rays.
The consortium hosted an April 20 groundbreaking ceremony at the health equity center in North Philadelphia.
“This new facility represents our commitment to providing the highest quality diagnostic care and cutting-edge technology to our community,” the organization wrote in an Instagram post. “Together, we are building a future of accessible, equitable healthcare for all.”
Stanford founded the consortium during the pandemic to increase access to resources in Philadelphia’s underserved communities. She then founded the health equity center — a multidisciplinary ambulatory care facility — to improve outcomes and healthcare access in areas of low life expectancy.
The new imaging center will expand her mission by providing access to “advanced diagnostic services.”
Stanford is one of four Democratic candidates in the race for the seat in the House of Representatives currently held by U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Pa.). Her candidacy follows Evans’ announcement that he would not seek reelection to Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District seat, having held the position since 2016. The Third Congressional District includes West Philadelphia, parts of Center City, North Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia.
In a post to X, Evans wrote that he helped secure $3 million in federal funding to open the new imaging facility.
“I’m proud to see the outsized impact Dr. Stanford and the center have had throughout our community, as they expand access to quality, affordable health care,” he wrote.
Who, What, Why: Kara Butler on museum education
Who
Kara Butler likes old things. She loves museums and history, enjoys police procedurals and soap operas (“‘The Bold and the Beautiful?’ Wow, that’s my show,” she says),—and inherited an interest in scrapbooking from her mother.
Butler, a fourth-year anthropology and communication double-major from Philadelphia, also loves talking to people and asking questions.
“My interest in what I want to do post-grad has shaped itself into being—shocker!—museums and specifically museum education, the educational programming that’s in museums and how exhibits are designed,” she says. After graduation, she will pursue her master’s in education, culture, and society from the Graduate School of Education, examining the role of museums as vehicles for public education.
What
Butler first interned at the Penn Museum in high school through the Bloomberg Arts Internship program and returned the summer after her first year at Penn through the Summer Humanities Internship Program. Working with the museum’s Learning and Community Engagement Department, she designed a self-guided tour for college-aged visitors, with a goal of capturing and engaging different audiences.
Over the past year, she has been working remotely for the SPIRITS Museum in Virginia, which advances scholarly research on colonial-era distillation—not just alcohol, Butler says, but also perfume. This has involved researching the rum trade and the beverage’s fall-off in the United States as whiskey became more popular.
Last summer, she visited the Imperial War Museum London for another project: researching the intersection of World War II-era wartime propaganda and childhood for her Wolf Humanities Center undergraduate fellowship. There, she saw children’s clothing featuring a picture of a kid with a missile and comics of kids pretending to be soldiers. Butler is interested in the ideologies that kids picked up and in parallels between how Americans and Japanese portrayed children.
Why
With interests in history, museums, and people, Butler knew in high school that she wanted to study anthropology, but a suggestion from a professor put her on the path toward double majoring in communication. As a student at Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School in Roxborough, Butler participated in a dual enrollment program at Penn, and her professor recommended she take Ritual Communication, which she did once enrolled at Penn.
Taking this ethnography-based course opened her eyes to the breadth of communication as a field beyond her previous associations with journalism and marketing. She says that communication courses have given her the tools to communicate anthropological findings accessible to non-experts who visit museums—places she loves for their public education mission and for the opportunity they offer visitors to learn and interpret information in different ways.
“In high school, I just liked to go to museums because I liked to learn,” Butler says. “Now, it’s because a, I like to learn and b, I like to see how other people interact with the same material. Is there something that somebody is more drawn to than I would be? You can go to a museum seven times and probably have most of the material memorized, but when you’re going with a different group of people, it’s a different journey every single time.”
Read more on Penn Today.
Barrow Earns Second Gymnast of the Week Honor Wednesday
The Gymnastics East Conference released their weekly awards Wednesday, with junior Jordan Barrow earning Co-Gymnast of the Week.
Junior Jordan Barrow (Jackson, Tenn.) was a key contributor for Penn in both meets this week as the Quakers finished second in each competition. At the Temple Quad, Barrow highlighted the meet with a 9.850 on beam to place third, while also adding a 9.800 on bars.
She followed that performance with another strong showing at the Pink Invitational, finishing top five in all three of her events, including a first-place finish on beam with a 9.875, along with a 9.825 on vault (3rd) and 9.800 on bars (T-5th). This marks Barrow’s second GEC Gymnast of the Week honor this season.
Barrow will continue to be a large factor for the Quakers as they head into the end of the regular season, visiting Towson and California this weekend.
#FightOnPenn
Centering joy in AI development and implementation
Much of the research on artificial intelligence and human emotion focuses on potential negative implications and emotional states such as depression, with less focus on joy, gratitude, and connection. But Penn Integrates Knowledge professor Desmond Upton Patton says he and collaborators envision a future where people’s experiences—from social media to banking—are shaped by systems that seek to amplify joy.
“Current tech business models focus primarily on engagement without regard for whether such engagement stems from joy or distress, anger, and frustration,” they write in a new paper published in The Paris Journal on AI & Digital Ethics.
In the paper, the researchers present a framework for instead considering how to incorporate joy in the design and deployment of AI models. They are specifically focused on empowering marginalized communities, who experience greater bias from large language models. The goal of the framework is to assist engineers, designers, and researchers in developing AI models that promote more nuanced, compassionate AI interactions.
“We define joy as both an emotion and a tool for liberation, freedom-building, and reimagining possibility,” says Patton, who has primary appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and School of Social Policy and Practice. “A joy-centered approach to AI challenges researchers and engineers to design models that recognize human strengths, elevate resilience, and foster thriving digital environments.”
In a study that informed the creation of the framework, researchers recruited New York City university students and Black Harlem residents to use Integrating Emotional Stories Online, a social media platform developed by computer scientists, linguists, and social work researchers to examine how people express grief and distress online.
Prompted to share their emotions and events that triggered them, the 125 users shared 949 posts from February to December 2022. The most striking theme the researchers identified was joy, with users writing about hope, gratitude, love, ease, and spirituality as coping mechanisms.
“People experiencing loss still recognize, seek, and value moments of joy,” Patton says. “That insight pushed us to consider how AI could intentionally optimize for joy, especially in a world where trauma, grief, and pain are part of everyday life.”
Their framework lays out how joy could be centered in team creation, conception, design and updates, and deployment of AI models. For example, they say that teams creating AI models should include not only engineers and computational modelers but also social scientists such as sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists.
Read more about Upton’s research at Penn Today.
The Beauty of the Brain
Chidinma Esielem (’27), a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, investigated possible links between sleep disturbances and brain pathologies indicative of Alzheimer’s disease with mentorship from Dr. Shinjae Chung (Department of Neuroscience). This research was supported by the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program.
This summer I used a mouse model to study the accumulation of amyloid beta plaques, a key pathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, in specific areas of the brain. In particular, I investigated connections between those brain regions and their role in sleep function by exploring possible links between amyloid beta deposition and observed sleep disturbances.
Since coming to Penn, I have started to really appreciate my brain. By the time I finished organic chemistry, I was astounded by my brain’s ability to process information. I was fortunate to work in Dr. Chung’s lab and explore my fascination with the brain. I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would have the opportunity to be a part of research to find a cure for something like Alzheimer’s disease. My experience over the summer gave me the greatest blessing—to learn about the things that I love and contribute to changing the world for the better.
Throughout my ten weeks in the lab, I picked up a myriad of technical skills. I learned how to section mouse brains, stain slides, and score behavioral tests conducted on mice. Having finished analyzing my data, I now realize how important every step of the research process is. Any skill I thought was insignificant turned out to have a large impact on my results.
Initially, the biggest challenge for me was adjusting to the 9-to-5 lifestyle as I had never had a “real” job before. However, I realized that waking up early and working for 8 hours wasn’t especially difficult, because I already did these things for school. What truly was daunting was coming to the lab everyday with an expectation that I would need to pivot. Sometimes our results were too ambiguous to accurately interpret, or they were the complete opposite of what we initially expected. These outcomes were difficult for my brain to accept. The research process is so much different from my classroom experiences where I attend a lecture, learn a concept, and then take an exam to demonstrate my understanding. Sometimes, conducting research can make you feel foolish. The process of studying the unknown, tackling a subject such as the brain, is riddled with failure. However, I learned that failure is normal, even encouraged, and that when it happens, you just need to try another approach. These challenges have shown me that research tests how much you really care. As it turns out, I care a lot.
Read more about student research at PennCURF.
Penn fourth-year Florence Onyiuke named a 2026 Rhodes Scholar
University of Pennsylvania fourth-year Florence Onyiuke, from Altamonte Springs, Florida, has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford in England.
The Rhodes, established in 1902, is highly competitive and one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world. The scholarship funds tuition and a living stipend for two or three years of graduate study at Oxford and may allow funding in some instances for four years. At Oxford, Onyiuke plans to pursue a master’s degree in economic development with a focus on West Africa.
Onyiuke is pursuing an international relations and business degree in the Huntsman Program, a dual degree program in the Wharton School and the School of Arts & Sciences, as well as a minor in Spanish. Onyiuke’s interests include international economic development, international law, and immigration. Her senior thesis, based on research she conducted in Spain during a Penn Abroad semester last spring, explores the informal economy and socioeconomic mobility of West African street vendors in Barcelona. Onyiuke was a Frederick Douglass Global Fellow, a three-year Perry World House Student Fellow, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board, and executive director of Black Wharton Consulting. She is also a Coca Cola Scholar, Ron Brown Scholar, and recipient of the Presidential Service and Educational Excellence Awards.
According to the Rhodes Trust, about 100 Rhodes Scholars will be selected worldwide this year. Onyiuke is among the 32 American Rhodes Scholars chosen to represent the United States. According to the Rhodes Trust, this year nearly 2,800 American students began the application process; 965 were endorsed by 264 different colleges and universities; and 238 applicants reached the final stage of the competition.
Onyiuke applied for the Rhodes Scholarship with assistance from Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.
Read more news on Penn Today.
In Photos: Philadelphia commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Million Man March
30 years ago, the Million Man March gathered over 400,000 Black men at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to unite against social inequality and promote Black unity. The event highlighted the importance of community, bringing together people from all around the D.C. area, including Penn community members. 1998 Wharton graduate Brandale Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois College House desk receptionist Stephanie Robinson, and 1998 Engineering graduate Anthony Crawford are just a few Penn affiliates who attended the march.
While the initial march garnered much political and social awareness, many found its impact on the structural issues lacking. Former Daily Pennsylvanian columnist and 2005 graduate from the Graduate School of Education Vinay Harpalani praised the message of the Million Man March but commented on the lack of a systemic call to action.
On Oct. 26, Philly Truce, an organization focused on empowering Black men to contend with systemic inequities and promoting community safety, concluded their week-long commemoration of the Million Man March’s 30th anniversary with a 5k march. The crowd of around 1,500 ended in LOVE Park to listen to a lineup of speakers advocating for the Black Philadelphian community.
Read more from Ebunoluwa Adesida‘s coverage of the march at the DP here.
‘Capstone of my career’: Penn professor Dorothy Roberts wins 2025 Bioethics Founders’ Award
Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Dorothy Roberts has been named the 2025 recipient of the Bioethics Founders’ Award by The Hastings Center for Bioethics.
Roberts is the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society and maintains appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences. She was presented with the award on Oct. 23 at the annual conference of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in Portland, Ore.
“This [award] … is a capstone of my career in bioethics and social justice,” Roberts said in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian. “I’m retiring in June 2027, so it’s very gratifying to have this recognition at the end of my academic career.”
The ASBH extended the award to Roberts in recognition of her contributions to bioethics and the impact of her research on life sciences, medicine, and policymaking.
“This particular award is very meaningful to me, because The Hastings Center is one of the premier bioethics centers in the United States … that has always been on the cutting edge of pushing the boundaries of bioethics,” Roberts added. “Receiving the award represents how far bioethics has come in recognizing the essential importance of social justice and equality.”
The 2025 Bioethics Founders’ Award was also presented to John Harris, a professor emeritus at the University of Manchester. Harris is also the founding director of the International Association of Bioethics, a network that allows bioethicists from around the world to share their knowledge and resources with each other. The Hastings Center unanimously recommended Roberts and Harris as the recipients of the award.
Roberts recalled how the ceremony’s audience consisted of “so many younger bioethicists … who [she encouraged] along the way.” She described hearing their applause as a “gratifying honor.”
Since 2011, Roberts has served as a fellow at The Hastings Center, where she has “learned a lot” from other fellows and discussed “very important issues,” including eugenics and genetic technologies.
Roberts also serves as the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. Her research focuses on a variety of public policy issues, such as social justice, reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics.
Her most recent book, titled “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World,” explored systemic racial biases within the child welfare system. Roberts also called for the abolition of the current welfare system which, she argued, has punished Black families.
Read more about this landmark achievement for Roberts at the Daily Pennsylvanian.