Alejandro Ribeiro: Expanding Applications of Network Science

The real power behind a network, says Alejandro Ribeiro, isn’t its component parts. It’s the myriad ways they connect with one another. The social bonds we share with others. The flow of information that makes the internet possible. Even the tiny electrical impulses that appear between neurons in the brain, letting us think, feel, taste, […]

Kathleen Stebe Wins 2018 Langmuir Lectureship Award

Kathleen Stebe, Penn Engineering’s Deputy Dean for Research and Richer & Elizabeth Goodwin Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has won the 2018 Langmuir Lectureship Award.

Karen Winey is featured in Design News’ “It Takes a Village to Create Solid Electrolytes”

ModLab’s ‘SMORES’ Modify Their Environment to Get the Job Done

Given the exact parameters of the task at hand, a robot can assemble a car door or pack a box faster and more efficiently than any human, but such purpose-built machines aren’t good for much else. With that in mind, the history of robotics research is marked by devising ways of giving machines more and […]

Penn Engineers Update a User-friendly Device for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

In 2016, Penn Engineers published a paper introducing a hand-held device for detecting Zika virus. Using a Thermos, a microfluidics chip and a smartphone, the “smart-connected cup” can screen saliva, urine, or blood samples for signature genetic material of the Zika virus. The device streamlines and condenses processes that health providers usually carry out in […]

Matt Blaze is quoted in KTVZ’s “Wyden-Merkley bill would require paper ballots, audits”

At TED, Professor Aaswath Raman Talks About the Cold of Space as a Renewable Resource

Aaswath Raman, one of the newest members of the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, is using his background in optics and materials science to take an ancient idea and apply it to a pressing, modern-day problem: cooling. He spoke at this year’s TED conference in Vancouver, explaining how harnessing “radiative cooling” could be the […]

Machine Learning Researchers Try to Improve Working Conditions for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Workers

In the late 1700s, a Hungarian inventor built what appeared to be a chess-playing automaton, cloaked in Ottoman robes and a turban. The machine, known as the Mechanical Turk, impressed crowds and challenged opponents across Europe and the Americas. Eventually it was revealed that the Turk was not automated at all. Rather, a skilled chess […]

Norm Badler is featured in “Original Philadelphians” interview

Paving the Way for Safer, Smaller Batteries and Fuel Cells

Research led by Karen I. Winey, TowerBrook Foundation Faculty Fellow, professor and Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, and Edward B. Trigg, then a doctoral student in her lab, introduces a new and versatile kind of solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) that has twice the proton conductivity of the current state-of-the-art material.