Guinness Recognizes Piccolissimo as World’s Smallest Self-Powered Flying Robot

Guinness World Records has officially recognized Piccolissimo as the World’s Smallest Self-Powered Flying Robot. Italian for “tiniest,” Piccolissimo is the brain child of Matt Piccoli, a graduate student in professor Mark Yim’s ModLab.

Matt Blaze is featured in PBS News Hour’s “An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes”

Undergraduate Summer Research Projects Honored at Annual Symposium

Penn Engineering is home to several summer research programs for undergraduates, three of which come together to honor their participants’ accomplishments working under faculty and graduate student advisors and contributing to their research projects. The LittleJohn and Rachleff Scholars programs are open to Penn Engineering students in all departments, while SUNFEST, supported by the National […]

The Snow Graphics in ‘Frozen’ Can Predict the Mechanics of Real Avalanches

When a slab of snow cracks and slides down a slope, the exact size and shape of the resulting avalanche is hard to predict. The sliding slab is denser than the snow underneath it, giving the system a mix of solid and liquid properties. Chenfanfu Jiang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information […]

Shveta Gupta: Voices of Penn Engineering Master’s Alumni

This is part of our series of articles written by Penn Engineering alums about their experiences at Penn and how it shaped their lives. Our next article is by Shveta Gupta, who graduated with a master’s in Electrical Engineering in 2018. She is now at Intel, working as a firmware engineer.

How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions

Damon Centola, associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Penn Engineering, uses formal and computational models of social networks to study collective human dynamics. As the Director of the Network Dynamics Group and a member of the Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences, he uses online experiments to study how changes to […]

Dental Plaque is No Match for Catalytic Nanoparticles

Combine a diet high in sugar with poor oral hygiene habits and dental cavities, or caries, will likely result. The sugar triggers the formation of an acidic biofilm, known as plaque, on the teeth, eroding the surface. Early childhood caries is a severe form of tooth decay that affects one in every four children in […]

New GRASP Project Aims to Leverage ‘Embodied Intelligence’ via a Robotic Squirrel

It takes about a year before human infants master their own motor skills well enough to walk. Legged robots don’t have it so easy. Only the most advanced can walk with a smooth, natural gait, and even those can be stymied by a small pile of rubble or sand. A team of researchers, led from […]

Paris Perdikaris Predicts Complex Outcomes of Physical Systems

Since the days of Isaac Newton, scientists have been monitoring and predicting the movements of falling apples, heavenly bodies, ocean currents and just about anything that can go from point A to point B. These models have grown increasingly complex, but so have the physical phenomena they depict. Now the mechanisms behind cutting-edge technology, in […]

Penn and Lehigh Research Team Seeks Alternative Ammonia Production Methods for Sustainable Fertilizers

A Penn Engineering team from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, including John M. Vohs, Carl V. S. Patterson Professor and Chair, Raymond J. Gorte, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor, and Aleksandra Vojvodic, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation, is collaborating with Lehigh University’s Steven McIntosh on research that seeks an alternative production […]