Penn iGEM Team Wins Regional Competition with Novel Epigenetic Engineering Toolbox
For the second year in a row, Penn’s iGEM team is the winner of the North American Regional iGEM competition, which was held on October 4 to 6 at the University of Toronto, Canada. Held by the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation, the iGEM competition is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams […]
Penn Engineering Learns a Few New Tricks
The Department of Bioengineering celebrated Engineering Week in February by sponsoring several events, including one with a special canine visitor from the Penn Vet Working Dog Center (PVWDC). McBaine, an eleven-week-old springer spaniel puppy, visited Penn Engineering as part of the “Dogs & Devices” event organized by the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the Rachleff […]
Jessie Huang Receives 2013 Undergraduate Student Paper Award
Jessie Huang (BE’13) is a recipient of the 2013 Undergraduate Student Paper Award granted by the Philadelphia Engineering Foundation and the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia. As part of the 2013 Delaware Valley Engineers Week (DVEW), local engineers and educators gathered for an awards luncheon on February 15, 2013, to recognize outstanding math and science teachers, […]
Bioengineering undergrads win regional award at iGEM competition
Four Bioengineering undergraduates were named the overall regional winners of the Americas East Jamboree that is part of the prestigious International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition, a synthetic biology research contest (http://igem.org/). The Penn team beat out 42 other teams from 40 universities — including Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Cornell — to win the regional […]
An Applied Learning Experience in Africa
Studying abroad continues to hold wide appeal for many U.S. college students. It is an opportunity to become immersed for a short time in a different culture, to step out of the “American-ness” of one’s life and learn to appreciate how others live and work. But when engineering majors go to a developing country and […]
Researchers solve the puzzle of controlled therapeutic release of macromolecules
When a large volume of medication is the prescription, steady and controlled release of the drug sometimes is preferred by physicians over a “burst-release” treatment in which the substance is administered all at once. In recent years, researchers have developed numerous ways to administer substances in a controlled way, but doing so for therapeutics of […]
Penn Engineers and physicians work together to improve patient health
Physicians know that once a patient has a heart attack, he or she is at increased risk for developing heart failure. That’s because of a complex series of physiological events that occur after someone suffers a myocardial infarction (or heart attack). Specifically, there is increased stress in the heart tissue, which leads to heart enlargement […]
Improving Disease Detection in Clinical Settings
The rapid advancement in our understanding of the regulatory and signaling pathways responsible for cell growth, differentiation and death has led to the identification of many anomalies in the genome and proteome that can be associated with disease. The research of Andrew Tsourkas, associate professor of Bioengineering, focuses on developing nanosensors that can be used […]
Laser-like Focus on Nanotech Design
Computer models developed collaboratively by Penn researchers are instrumental in improving nanocarriers Tiny engineered particles that can hold molecules in their hollow interiors can be targeted to specific tissue types by means of the antibodies on their exteriors. Because the choice of antibodies determines what they can bind to, these nanocarriers can serve as markers […]
Brian Chow Joins Bioengineering Faculty
Brian Chow, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, is an expert in optogenetics, a field in neuroscience that combines the power of optical control with the precision of genetic techniques to manipulate biological systems. This broad area is significant due to its potential in neurobiology, as well as understanding other complex biological systems. “There […]