Karen Winey: At the Helm of Materials Science
To excel in materials science research, you need curiosity about the microscopic building blocks of matter, and the creativity to design radical new properties on which to build the next technologies. Fortuitously, Karen Winey, TowerBrook Foundation Faculty Fellow in Penn Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), has a long-proven career in doing both. […]
Penn Researchers Shed Light on the Roundworm’s Curious Swimming Behavior
The round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode, is a puzzling creature. A previous study at the University of Pennsylvania established that, in some cases, these nematodes are actually counter-current and swim upstream rather than with the flow of liquid as a result of hydrodynamic forces. Another study indicated that they tend to accumulate next to […]
Stephanie Weirich Receives ACM Sigplan’s Robin Milner Young Researcher Award
Stephanie Weirich is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Programming Languages Robin Milner Young Researcher Award. The award is given to recognize outstanding contributions by investigators in the first twenty years of their professional career. The award recognizes Weirich’s deep and sustained contributions to programming language research in the […]
Christopher Fang-Yen receives European Union Horizons 2020 Funding
Dr. Christopher Fang-Yen, Wilf Family Term Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, has been awarded $357,327 over four years from European Union Horizons 2020 to conduct a study of lifespan and healthspan in the roundworm C. elegans, as part of the Ageing with elegans collaboration. Horizons 2020 is the largest Research and Innovation program in the European […]
Miniature Devices, Life-Size Impact
Before joining the Penn Engineering faculty, David Issadore was immersed in a quantum mechanics problem at Harvard University. However, during this time he found his mind wandering to the lab next door, which was building miniaturized diagnostic tools for disease. After talking with the students in that lab about their research, he was hooked, and […]
DOE Renews Hammer and Lee’s Grant to Study Synthetic Cells
Daniel Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Daeyeon Lee, Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, had their grant renewed by the Department of Energy’s Biomolecular Materials program to determine how to build communication machinery into synthetic materials and ultimately engineer synthetic cells. The project, […]
Dan Huh: Engineering human organs onto a microchip
High costs, animal testing controversies, and long delays of drug development are becoming some of the greatest economical and ethnical challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Dan Huh talks about how bioengineers might be able to circumvent this long-standing problem by using microengineering technologies to build more realistic models of human organs using […]
Danielle Bassett: Understanding your brain as a network… and as art
How do connectivity patterns inside of your brain change when you learn a new skill? Danielle Bassett seeks to uncover this complexity and develop treatments for neurological diseases with math—and art.
Ritesh Agarwal: Silicon Nanophotonics: Turn Off the Dark
Agarwal briefly discusses the amazing progress made in the area of computer technology outlining some key advances leading to the development of modern computers.
Three Class of 2014 Bioengineers Develop Point-of-Care Blood Test
Build a better mousetrap. That’s the axiom for entrepreneurial success, and one which three young bioengineers have leveraged to improve the typical blood test. If their prototype proves successful, 2014 graduates Peter Bacas, Max Lamb and Nishant Neel intend to replace a typical needle-based test with a pain-free experience that provides almost instantaneous results. “Data […]