School of Engineering & Applied Science

The future of technology

As new technologies emerge, they bring with them new ethical challenges. The topic of the future of technology was front and center on day three of the Penn Teach-in.

Building futures through LEGOs

In the FIRST LEGO League tournament, middle school teams mentored by Penn Engineering students worked to design and build robots related to the theme of water.

Penn engineers test drug transfer using placenta-on-a-chip

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have demonstrated the feasibility of their “organ-on-a-chip” platform in studying how drugs are transported across the human placental barrier.

Penn engineering research gives optical switches the ‘contrast’ of electronic transistors

Current computer systems represent bits of information — the 1’s and 0’s of binary code — with electricity. Circuit elements, such as transistors, operate on these electric signals, producing outputs that are dependent on their inputs.

Penn Engineers Make First Full Network Model of the Musculoskeletal System

Network science examines how the actions of a system’s individual parts affect the behavior of the system as a whole. Some commonly studied networks include computer chip components and social media users, but University of Pennsylvania engineers are now applying network science to a much older system: the human body.

Penn senior takes up worldwide challenge of climate-change refugees

A political science major and student fellow at Penn's Perry World House is working with a team of student fellows to construct a website showing how cities deal with an influx of climate change refugees.

Penn Engineers: Bone Marrow Transplant Stem Cells Can 'Swim' Upstream

When a cancer patient receives a bone marrow transplant, time is of the essence. Healthy stem cells, which can restart the production of blood cells and immune system components after a patient’s own are compromised, need to make their way from the circulatory system into the bones as quickly as possible.

Penn Researchers Develop an Injectable Gel that Helps Heart Muscle Regenerate after a Heart Attack

In mammals, including humans, the cells that contract the heart muscle and enable it to beat do not regenerate after injury. After a heart attack, there is a dramatic loss of these heart muscle cells and those that survive cannot effectively replicate.

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 atoms would change during failure.

Penn Engineers Develop Microchip Laser Stabilizer, Enabling Faster Data Transfer

With streaming movies and UltraHD television taking more and more bandwidth, there is a race to deliver data into people’s homes as quickly as possible. Light-based fiber optic connections promise far faster data rates than standard electricity-based coaxial cables, so making laser sources smaller, cheaper and more stable is a high priority for engineers.

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