Mechanical Engineering

‘I Look Like an Engineer’

For the third year in a row, Penn Engineering’s Advancing Women in Engineering program, dedicated to recruiting, retaining and promoting all female-identified students in the School, participated in the “I Look Like an Engineer” social media movement.

From Penn Engineering Today

The Philadelphia Orchestra is playing safe

Penn experts are working with The Philadelphia Orchestra to study the aerosol droplets that wind and brass musicians produce when playing. Their findings, aimed at reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission, could help the Orchestra once again play together.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Researchers reach new heights with light-based levitation

Penn researchers are working to engineer nanoscale features on ultra-lightweight materials, finding the ideal combination that will allow those materials to lift themselves into the air using the energy provided by light.

Evan Lerner

Niko Simpkins: At the nexus of engineering and music

For Niko Simpkins, a musician who performs, produces, and engineers his own tracks, the most exciting processes combine structure and flexibility, creativity, and rigor. As a third-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, he sees his mechanical engineering education as a framework for problem solving that might serve him across a broad set of endeavors, and for now, he’s more interested in learning than narrowing to any one particular career path.

Evan Lerner

Using stress to shape microlevel structures

A new study describes how external forces drive the rearrangement of individual particles in disordered solids, enabling new ways to imbue materials with unique mechanical properties.

Erica K. Brockmeier

Scrap metal-powered lights win Y-Prize 2020

The winning team of this year’s Y-Prize, an invention competition in which entrants are challenged to pitch an innovative business plan for a technology developed at Penn Engineering, Metal Light, proposes technology to provide illumination for houses not connected to electrical grids.

Penn Today Staff



In the News


CNBC

Students can soon major in AI at this Ivy League university—it’ll prepare them for ‘jobs that don’t yet exist’

The Raj and Neera Singh Program in Artificial Intelligence at Penn will be the first AI undergraduate engineering major at an Ivy League school, led by George Pappas of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

FULL STORY →



Philadelphia Inquirer

What’s so ‘magic’ about the secret South Jersey mud rubbed on baseballs? These Penn researchers think they know why

Doug Jerolmack of the School of Arts & Sciences, Paulo Arratia of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and colleagues are researching the chemical properties of baseball’s “magic mud” for use in applications beyond sports.

FULL STORY →



ANI News (India)

University of Pennsylvania pledges to bolster relations with India at "Penn India Engagement Forum"

PIK Professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Dean Erika H. James of the Wharton School, and Dean Vijay Kumar of the School of Engineering and Applied Science are quoted on the forum to support India's exceptional growth and specific health care needs.

FULL STORY →



Associated Press

Tackling threat of mudslides in soaked California

Douglas Jerolmack of the School of Arts & Sciences says that debris basins can be costly, becoming overwhelmed by new landslides or mudslides that have been worsened by climate change.

FULL STORY →



Technical.ly Philly

Artists and Penn Ph.D.s collabed to explore the intersection of art and engineering. Check out their exhibit

In the culminating project of Penn’s Robotics Art Residency, three artists hosted at the Pennovation Center developed collaborative exhibits with Ph.D. students at the GRASP Lab of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Weitzman School of Design.

FULL STORY →



Physics World

Liquid crystals bring robotics to the microscale

In collaboration with the University of Ljubljana, Kathleen Stebe of the School of Engineering and Applied Science has built a swimming microrobot that paddles by rotating liquid crystal molecules.

FULL STORY →