A dean's conversations with Penn faculty, from climate to crime.
OMNIA collects podcast series from Penn Arts and Sciences, including Horizons and Ampersand, in which Dean Mark Trodden talks with a faculty member about their work. Climate science sits next to criminology, child psychology, data science and AI, and the question of what undergraduates should learn in common.
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OMNIA is less a single show than a feed for several podcast series produced by Penn Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of those series, Horizons and Ampersand, share a simple setup. Dean Mark Trodden talks with one faculty member, starting from the guest's research and moving out to what it means for students, policy and public life. Horizons is framed around the big issues shaping the world and higher education, while Ampersand describes itself as faculty from different disciplines taking up a topic they have in common. What a listener gets is range. In 'Climate Science in an Age of Uncertainty', Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, describes being drawn into the public sphere to defend climate science from attacks, a role he did not choose but came to embrace. That work grew into communicating the science to the public and to policymakers, and Trodden asks about the class Mann teaches on climate and environmental communication. In 'Today’s Defining Challenges are Global', Guy Grossman talks about the Penn Development Research Initiative, known as the PDRI Dev Lab, which he wants to work as a self-sustaining ecosystem rather than a series of one-off papers. Trodden, openly fascinated, presses him for projects that have had tangible policy impact. The Ampersand conversations range even further. With Bhuvnesh Jain, the talk turns to data science and AI, and the dean states an uncomfortable question plainly: what if a model puts a very tight set of error bars around an answer that is fundamentally wrong? Jain admits that this worries him more, because checking every step gets much harder when a neural net carries millions of free numbers. John McDonald, Professor of Criminology, weighs forecasting tools and automated report writing against the risk that people get profiled unjustly, while granting that the same tools, used well, can help. Rebecca Waller, Associate Professor of Psychology, explains why early childhood has to be studied through the relationship between parent and child, and points to good evidence that parenting interventions can have big effects. Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, turns to the undergraduate curriculum itself. She praises the free range of American electives but asks what students and faculty ought to share in common. Her conversation also covers the role of higher education in strengthening democracy and the 250th anniversary of American independence. The dean's style as an interviewer is part of the appeal: he admits when he is getting into the weeds, and he stays with a thread when it interests him. With Waller, he notices that her account of child development depends on the parent-child relationship, and she thanks him for catching it. The tone is friendly rather than combative. For a first listen, 'From Dark Energy to Data Science' shows how far the questions can go into method, while 'Fighting Crime Through Design' shows how quickly research runs into public consequences.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes hearing researchers explain their own work in plain conversation, and who wants to know what one school of arts and sciences is studying and teaching across very different fields.
What sets it apart: The Horizons and Ampersand conversations are led by the dean of the school whose faculty he is interviewing, so they move easily between research findings and questions about teaching, students and what a research university is for. In one feed the subjects run from data science and AI to criminology, child psychology, climate and history.
OMNIA is a podcast dedicated to all things Penn Arts & Sciences. Listen to insights and perspectives from the home of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences at The University of Pennsylvania.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Michael Mann discusses climate science as research, teaching, and public communication at Penn.
Climate science is treated here as public work as much as research work: the movement from lab findings into policy rooms, classrooms, and broader public debate.
A clear, grounded look at global research, student experience, and the policy stakes of humanitarian cuts in Uganda.
Global politics comes through as a practical research challenge, not an abstract headline. Dean Mark Trodden's conversation with Guy Grossman, David M.
A physicist makes the case that AI's hardest cosmology problem may be knowing when an answer is wrong.
Dark energy becomes the entry point for a careful conversation about cosmology, data science, and the habits researchers need when powerful tools enter the room.
A measured look at where crime-fighting technology can help, and where human judgment still has to hold the line.
Ampersand frames crime prevention as a problem shaped by urban design, data, technology, and social science, then lets the conversation settle into the harder question of judgment.
A grounded look at how parent-child relationships shape the science of development.
Child development comes into focus here as a matter of relationships, not isolated traits. Mark Trodden speaks with Rebecca Waller about how parenting, behavior management, and child temperament shape one another, with particular attention to antisocial behavior and early risk.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
["Dean Mark Trodden interviews Michael Mann on Horizons, linking Penn Arts and Sciences, climate science, and science communication in one conversation.", "Mann traces his path from Yale physics and Carl Sagan's Cosmos to Barry Saltzman's climate modeling work and the 1998 and 1999 hockey-stick reconstructions built from tree rings, ice cores, corals, and cave deposits.", "He says U.S.
Dean Mark Trodden interviews Guy Grossman, Penn's David M.
Mark Trodden and Bhuvnesh Jain use Ampersand to trace how Penn Arts and Sciences is connecting cosmology, AI, and teaching through the Penn Data-Driven Discovery Initiative.
Mark Trodden, Penn's Dean of Arts and Sciences, interviews John McDonald, the Professor of Criminology and director of the M.S.
["Rebecca Waller says psychology has moved from 10-person fMRI studies to imaging tens of thousands of participants, and that scale now shapes how she studies child development and antisocial behavior.", "Penn Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Trodden, a cosmologist, interviews Waller and keeps returning to the problem of measuring huge, messy systems across disciplines.", "Waller says she read every Agatha Christie book before age 10, studied psychology at Oxford, and shifted from adult personality differences toward developmental origins at Penn.", "She ties callous-unemotional traits, parenting interventions, parent-child synchrony, postpartum depression, and the Penn-CHOP Ignite cohort to one question: what actually changes child outcomes?"]
Mark Trodden and Sophia Rosenfeld discuss why Penn undergraduates should study humanities alongside STEM fields, using history to question assumptions that appear natural.
In the Ampersand episode “Deans in Conversation,” Mark Trodden and Peter Strzok discuss Penn’s undergraduate experience, liberal arts education, and curriculum design during the rise of AI.
Sophia Rosenfeld and Sudip Bhatia examine choice through Rosenfeld’s book The Age of Choice and Bhatia’s cognitive-science research on economic and social decisions.
OMNIA host Stephanie Perry interviews Penn political scientist Roger Smith about Donald Trump's 2024 re-election and the future of U.S.
Stephanie Perry and John Lipinski examine how NBC News’s Decision Desk recognized Donald Trump’s 2024 victory by about 9 p.m.
OMNIA Podcast host Stephanie Perry interviews Mark Meredith, a political science professor and NBC News Decision Desk election analyst, about how U.S.
Stephanie Perry interviews Matthew Levandusky about U.S.
OMNIA host Stephanie Perry interviews Diana Mutz about political communication, partisan media, and U.S.
OMNIA Podcast host Stephanie Perry interviews historian Sophia Rosenfeld about truth, common sense, and political choice during the 2024 U.S.
OMNIA Podcast examines Carol Muller's graduate field-methods seminar and its project documenting Philadelphia's Black music history and the Philadelphia sound.
This episode explores how art and writing help people find meaning and cope with adversity during times of crisis like the pandemic.
This episode explores the challenges of communicating climate change science in a polarized world, highlighting the urgency of the 2021 COP26 summit.
This episode explores the phenomenon of science denial, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its historical roots in issues like climate change and tobacco.
This episode explores the COVID-19 crisis from multiple academic perspectives, including biology, sociology, and philosophy of science.
Historians and an English professor discuss past epidemics, including the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, to provide context for the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020's social upheavals.