Perry World House Expands Its Faculty Engagement With New Fellowship Projects 

Perry World House (PWH), the University of Pennsylvania’s hub for global policy engagement, is thrilled to announce new Faculty Fellows selected through PWH’s inaugural Faculty Fellowship Projects Initiative. The program expands PWH’s faculty engagement and provides new avenues for Penn ideas to generate global policy impact. 

“Perry World House was designed to help bridge the gap between the academic and policy worlds,” said PWH Faculty Director Michael C. Horowitz, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. “This new initiative allows us to expand our reach both within the Penn faculty community and externally to a broader swath of policymakers. We are delighted to formally work with a greater number of our esteemed colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and help them translate their work to have the greatest policy impact.” 

“One of Perry World House’s greatest strengths has always been its ability to connect Penn faculty with our broader network of policy practitioners,” said PWH Deputy Director Michael Weisberg. “The Faculty Fellowship Projects will allow us to deepen that work and help an expanded group of Penn experts connect with our vast network of practitioners around the globe.” 

The inaugural Faculty Fellowship Projects were selected over the summer. The Faculty Fellows will run a two-year project to translate their academic research into global policy impact with Perry World House’s support. The selected faculty members will leverage PWH’s resources, convening power, network, and ability to help translate academic research into policy action. Perry World House will run its second Faculty Fellowship Project selection process in spring/summer 2027. 

“Throughout my clinical and research career, I have learned that health outcomes are shaped as much by economic opportunity as they are by access to care. Paraprofessionals (CHWs, doulas) are essential partners in advancing health equity, but too often the systems they strengthen do not adequately invest in them,” said PWH Faculty Fellow Carmen Alvarez, a faculty member at Penn Nursing. “I am excited to collaborate with Perry World House to explore how we can better recognize, support, and elevate this workforce, creating pathways that benefit community health workers, their families, and the populations they serve.” 

“Penn faculty have always generated incredible research and ideas within their academic fields,” said PWH Executive Director Marie Harf, a former strategic communications advisor to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and CIA analyst. “Having come from the policy world, I can attest to the fact that these ideas and research are integral to generating innovative thinking within the policy community, and I am thrilled that Perry World House can help advance both Penn research and critical policy innovation simultaneously through these projects.” 

The inaugural cohort for PWH Faculty Fellowship Projects are:  

Erol Akçay, William W. Braham, and Jennifer Pinto-Martin: “Penn Aspen Resilience Science Initiative” (PARSI) will focus on building the Adaptation Atlas, an integrated, scientifically-grounded framework that asks: “what builds resilience, for whom, at what scale, and at what investment?” It will encompass a three-year campus-wide research program, drawing upon faculty insights from across Penn’s twelve schools, and will be part of a wider Perry World House project on climate change. 

Carmen Alvarez: “From Scale to Sustainability: Strengthening the Community-Based Women’s Health Workforce” seeks to understand and address the structural gaps in women’s health. The project will launch with a public event hosted by Perry World House examining the growing role of community-based health workers, doulas, and other paraprofessional health workers in advancing women’s health and health equity globally.  

Sarah Bush: “The Battle for Civil Society” focuses on how, at a period of risk for democractic actors around the world, international aid donors, multilateral bodies, and NGOs themselves urgently need ways to tell authentic civil society from its impostors and help genuine actors survive. The project will develop a toolkit to give international organizations a way to flag and authenticate credible NGOs working in areas that include aid, human rights, and elections. 

Guy Grossman: “After the Encampment Era: Rethinking Refugee Access to Land, Housing, and Economic Opportunity” will focus on forced displacement policy. The project’s core goal is to move the policy conversation from crisis management toward a forward-looking agenda centered on the structural conditions for refugee self-reliance. This project will be carried out jointly with Penn’s PDRI-DevLab. 

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet: “Neighbors and Newcomers: Collective Security in the Persian Gulf” will be a multipronged project that considers the strategic, economic, cultural, and political history of the Gulf to put forth alternative diplomatic frameworks that emphasize the region’s collective security. This project will be executed as one workstream in a bigger Perry World House project examining U.S.-Iran relations.  

Steven O. Kimbrough and Leigh A. Stearns: “From Polar Science to Global Policy: Evidence, Risk, and Decision-Making in the Arctic and the Antarctic” will combines Professor Stearns’s expertise in polar remote sensing and environmental change with Professor Kimbrough’s expertise in decision analysis under uncertainty. This initiative will give policymakers transparent tools for understanding risk, evaluating tradeoffs, and making robust decisions under deep uncertainty.