WHO:             Eric J. Schelter                       Associate Professor

University of Pennsylvania researchers will receive five of the 10 grants being awarded this year by the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, part of The Pittsburgh Foundation, which supports cutting-edge scientific research in chemistry, biology and physics at institutions across Pennsylvania.

If dark energy is hiding in the form of hypothetical particles called “chameleons,” a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, plans to flush them out.

Two thousand of the world’s top young coders will descend on the Wells Fargo Center from Friday, September 4 to Sunday September 6, battling for over $30,000 in prizes at the world’s largest collegiate hackathon: PennApps.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have made strides toward a new method of gene sequencing a strand of DNA’s bases are read as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole.  In a new study, they have shown that this technique can also be applied to proteins as way to learn more about their structure.

When Alison Sweeney, an assistant professor in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Physics and Astronomy, went scuba diving in Palau this summer, she wasn’t on vacation.

Big data sets are important tools of modern science. Mining for correlations between millions of pieces of information can reveal vital relationships or predict future outcomes, such as risk factors for a disease or structures of new chemical compounds.  

The University of Pennsylvania’s robotic soccer team continues its international reign, winning the Robot Soccer World Cup’s AdultSize Humanoid League for the second year in a row.

By encoding information in photons via their spin, “photonic” computers could be orders of magnitude faster and efficient than their current-day counterparts. Likewise, encoding information in the spin of electrons, rather than just their quantity, could make “spintronic” computers with similar advantages.   

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) cares for some of the world’s sickest children and does everything in its power to keep them from getting sicker. It is tasked with stopping viruses and bacteria from moving between patients, as well as with keeping them from entering the hospital in the first place.