SAS Dean Mark Trodden discusses ‘optimistic’ vision for school’s future in DP interview

School of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Trodden sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian to discuss his vision for the future of the school on Monday. 

In February, the school announced SAS Horizons, a framework with several guidelines for the school’s future — including plans to revamp the College’s undergraduate curriculum, provide new sources of research funding, and update Penn’s laboratories and classrooms. Trodden — who was appointed in June 2025 — previously told the DP his primary goal for his first six months in office was to outline this vision.

Trodden said that the creation process included meetings with “every single department” and “student groups, both undergraduate and graduate.” According to him, topics that “were very common across everyone's interests” included climate sustainability, artificial intelligence, and health. 

The planning process included insight from faculty advisory groups, department chairs, and a planning priorities committee. Trodden said they started with a “general sketch” and asked each group to “bring their own ideas.”

In a Feb. 25 email announcing the new initiative, Trodden wrote that the plan is “aligned with” the University’s 2023 strategic framework, “In Principle and Practice."  

“Horizons is a standalone plan,” Trodden said at the interview. “As we’ve constructed it, we have tried, where natural and clear, to align it well with In Principal and Practice, because we think In Principal and Practice is a very good plan for the University, and we want to be part of that plan.”

The website launched alongside the announcement outlined two foundational commitments for the proposal — “fostering community, culture, and belonging” and “partnering with the public.” 

Trodden described the plan as “right for the School of Arts and Sciences,” but added that “the next step is to ask how we make the most of everything we are by connecting to the rest of Penn.”

The plan included provisions to establish the “Dean’s Horizons Fund” which would fund research endeavors at the school, and a project to renovate Penn’s laboratories and classrooms in the David Rittenhouse Laboratory. 

“Locating the DRL as a plan when you’ve spent 17 years with an office in that building is not a difficult thing,” Trodden said. “That building is in dire need of a replacement, and it needs to be a place where we can do 21st century science … it needs to be a place where our students and our faculty can do the best work possible.”

Trodden has been a member of Penn’s faculty since 2009, and formally served as a professor, the co-director of the Center for Particle Cosmology, the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and associate dean of SAS. 

Trodden shared that the “most aggressive version” of a renovation timeline aims to have the new building by 2031 or early 2032.

Trodden expects the Dean’s Horizon Fund — which he described as “a much more holistic way to think about what it takes to support discovery” in the current education and research landscape — “to get going immediately.”

“In the current world, where we’re facing all kinds of challenges with research funding, it may be even more important than ever,” Trodden said. 

In February 2025, the National Institutes of Health announced a 15% funding cut to indirect costs that jeopardized $240 million in federal funding for Penn. Citing uncertainty over federal research funding, Penn directed SAS department chairs to significantly reduce graduate admissions, and in some cases, to rescind acceptances that had already been made later that month.

He added that while the fund is not meant to “replace” federal research grants, it “allows us to seek philanthropic support that we think will be meaningful to donors in a way that they’ll be able to understand how the money is used.”

Trodden characterized the framework — on the whole — as a “short to medium term” plan. 

“In the age of AI, in the age of rapid sort of geopolitical and political change in our own country, you can’t say this is a plan for 10 years,” Trodden said. “You have to say, ‘this is our plan for now.' We’ll pursue it, and then along the way, we will constantly revisit.”

Trodden made several references to recent “challenges” facing higher education institutions.  

“The challenges that the world faces today, some of them are similar to the challenges that I think the world and the school faced in the past, and some of them are very specific to this moment, and our job has been to put those things together into a coherent structure that we think tells the story of what the school’s interested in,” he described. 

Last March, the Trump administration froze an additional $175 million in federal funding to Penn, citing Penn’s policies allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports. Under a negotiated agreement announced on July 1, Penn agreed to comply with all Education Department demands regarding its Title IX compliance to restore its funding.

The White House also approached nine universities, including Penn, with the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — an agreement that would have provided the University with preferential funding treatment in exchange for sweeping institutional reform in October 2025. Penn rejected the compact just over two weeks later. 

“I do think of this plan at its most fundamental level as an optimistic document. It’s an optimistic, forward-looking vision, and it was inspired by the creativity and energy that we saw coming out of our planning process,” Trodden said. 

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