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On May 27, Penn Washington partnered with the Penn Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratory for Healthy Aging (PennAITech) and Penn Nursing to examine the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to support aging and improve the quality of life of older adults and their families, including persons with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.  PennAITech is a National Institute on Aging-funded initiative housed at Penn Nursing in partnership with Penn Medicine. Now celebrating…

Penn Washington Executive Director Celeste Wallander has a new piece in Foreign Affairs making the case that deterrence, the kind that kept a nuclear-armed Russia from expanding further into Europe for decades, is being dangerously under resourced right now. Drawing on her experience as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Wallander traces the…

On May 7-9, The Special Competitive Studies Project held its annual AI+ Expo, an event that has become widely recognized in D.C. for the depth and breadth of companies, universities, government officials, and diplomats engaged in the discussion and practice of AI.  Beneath the flashy drone shows, walking robots, and multitudes of AI companies from startups…

In January 2025, Chinese startup DeepSeek released an AI model that appeared to match America’s best —built for a fraction of the cost using chips crippled by U.S. export controls. Whether DeepSeek truly matches OpenAI’s capabilities remains widely disputed, but the market’s verdict was immediate. The announcement wiped $600 billion from Nvidia’s market value in…

On March 25th, I attended the “Making AI Work for the People” panel hosted by Georgetown University’s Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship (AIDC) and the Georgetown Democracy Initiative. The recent discourse from many universities about technology and ethics and governance were front and center at the popular Tech & Society week. I walked into the auditorium with a simple question: how can we move from theoretical…

A century ago, the world was about to plunge into a global depression that would empower fascist leaders bent on expansionist war that would leave more than 70 million people killed in nearly every region of the world.  That devastation is becoming a distant memory, in large part because of the work of national governments, non-governmental…

It’s no secret that Congress isn’t functioning as the founders envisioned, one where there is a constant building and reshaping of coalitions to create the nation’s laws. Instead of fostering deliberation, the modern House of Representatives has become a place where power is monopolized in the majority party leadership.  Even when legislation attracts broad bipartisan…

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Technology Leadership Summit on March 11, 2026 offered a useful opportunity to consider how questions of technology leadership increasingly cut across domestic and global policy. In this joint reflection, Nikki Hinshaw, Global Policy Programs Coordinator, and Sasha Nicholas, Domestic Policy Programs Coordinator, offer their respective perspectives on the summit and on the role the University of Pennsylvania is playing in…

To mark International Women’s Day this Sunday, Penn Washington is proud to highlight the women who make up our team, bringing their experience and insight to the policy challenges facing the United States, which the University of Pennsylvania helps to address through our research and through Penn Washington’s Policy Impact Programs. Reflecting on IWD 2026,…

Penn Washington Senior Fellow Steven Pearlstein contends that Congress has become so consumed by partisan gamesmanship that it’s ceding power to an overreaching president and activist Supreme Court. The result, he argues, is a fundamental breakdown of the constitutional framework of shared power and checks and balances that has served the country for over two…