Aaswath Raman is Getting Free Cooling Straight from the Sky
Aaswath Raman is joining the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering next month. He’s also the co-founder and chief scientific officer of SkyCool Systems. There, his background in optics and materials science have allowed him take an ancient idea and apply it to a pressing, modern-day problem.
Mobility21 is Making Self-Driving Cars Safer with Grand Theft Auto
Mobility21 is a new research partnership, funded by a five-year, $14 million grant from the Department of Transportation, that tackles all manners of transportation problems through the use of new information and sensing technologies.
Louis J. Soslowsky Receives H.R. Lissner Medal
Louis J. Soslowsky, PhD, the Fairhill Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, will receive the H.R. Lissner Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The Medal recognizes outstanding achievements in the field of bioengineering and is widely viewed as the highest honor in the […]
Pennovation and PERCH in the Lower Schuylkill Master Plan
The Pennovation Center and the Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub, PERCH, represent a key component of an development effort taking place on the banks of the lower Schuykill River. In this video, PERCH director Daniel Koditschek talks about the role a robotics lab can play and what it gains being next to Penn Vet’s […]
Penn Researchers Establish Universal Signature Fundamental to How Glassy Materials Fail
Dropping a smartphone on its glass screen, which is made of atoms jammed together with no discernible order, could result in it shattering. Unlike metals and other crystalline materials, glass and many other disordered solids cannot be deformed significantly before failing and, because of their lack of crystalline order, it is difficult to predict which […]
What Can Twitter Reveal About People With ADHD? Penn Researchers Provide Answers
What can Twitter reveal about people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD? Quite a bit about what life is like for someone with the condition, according to findings published by University of Pennsylvania researchers Sharath Chandra Guntuku and Lyle Ungar in the Journal of Attention Disorders. Twitter data might also provide clues to help facilitate more effective […]
Penn Researchers Working to Mimic Giant Clams to Enhance the Production of Biofuel
Alison Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying giant clams since she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sweeney, an assistant professor of physics in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences, and her collaborator Shu Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering in the School of […]
These small robots are inspired by origami
Roboticist Cynthia Sung has been doing origami since she was young. She says she was always excited by the possibility of taking something two-dimensional and folding it into a three-dimensional object that can move. Through origami, an ordinary, flat sheet of paper can become a talking frog or a crane that can flap its wings. […]
Penn Researchers Engineer Macrophages to Engulf Cancer Cells in Solid Tumors
One reason cancer is so difficult to treat is that it avoids detection by the body. Agents of the immune system are constantly checking the surfaces of cells for chemical signals that say they belong, but cancer cells express the same chemical signals as healthy ones. Without a way for the immune system to tell […]
Teaching Robots to ‘Feel with Their Eyes’
At first glance, Alex Burka, a Ph.D. student in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, looks like a ghostbuster. He walks into the Penn Bookstore strapped to a bulky orange backpack, holding a long, narrow instrument with various sensors attached.