A Research Leader, Reintroduced
The Client
The Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics (DBEI) at the University of Pennsylvania is uniquely structured: three distinct academic divisions operating as a single, cohesive research department to improve our understanding of diseases and health.
The department’s previous website laid a solid foundation, serving as a central hub for faculty, students, and research teams. But as DBEI’s impact and ambitions continued to grow, so did the need for a more modern digital experience, one that could better showcase this one-of-a-kind department and the research happening within it.
Penn DBEI partnered with Electric Kite to rethink and rebuild its digital presence, creating a platform that reflects the department’s innovation, amplifies its research, and makes it easier for people to discover all that it has to offer.
Our Role
- User Experience
- Web Creative
- Web Development
The Goal
What We Set Out to Do
- Create cohesion. Make the unity of DBEI’s three divisions feel intentional, intuitive, and distinctively Penn.
- Put people front and center. Faculty, students, and research teams are one of DBEI’s greatest strengths. We aimed to surface their work, impact, and collaboration opportunities across the site.
- Reinforce DBEI as a leader in research. Present DBEI in a way that generates interest, positive perception, and differentiation from peers.
- Support recruitment. Make a strong first impression on prospective faculty and students with clear pathways to programs and research areas.
- Modernize the experience. Clean navigation, streamlined content, and a flexible CMS to keep everything updated, no matter the team, topic, or timeline.
The Work
Listening First
We launched with a full immersion process: stakeholder interviews, user surveys, a discovery roundtable, and a heuristic analysis. What we heard? Users wanted a clear picture of who DBEI is, what they do, and how to connect.
Designing for Discovery
We translated those insights into a restructured information architecture with pages organized by people, divisions, research areas, and centers. Faculty profiles received a major upgrade, integrating automated feeds from Google Scholar and Penn’s FEDs system to ensure consistency and reduce manual maintenance.
Building Smart
We built a new WordPress website that is flexible and scalable, with features like:
- A multi-parameter faculty search tool
- Auto-fed news, events, and publications via LiveWhale (Penn Med’s calendaring system) and other integrations
- A condensed approach to the Centers of Excellence, where we folded 10 microsites into the main site experience
- Tagging systems that surface related work across divisions and research topics
And yes, we migrated a mountain of content—over 1,300 pages mapped and refined for launch.
The Results
A Department that Shows Its Strength
The new DBEI website now lives up to the innovation within its halls. Visitors can easily:
✅ Find and filter faculty by research interest, division, or topic
✅ See current publications and projects at a glance
✅ Explore how the department’s three divisions collaborate across research and education
✅ Get a compelling first impression, whether they’re a potential student, faculty member, or research partner
The Takeaway
What used to feel siloed now feels seamlessly connected. And most importantly, the site is as ambitious and forward-thinking as the department it represents.
Get in Touch
Want to talk about how Electric Kite can help your website experience?
