Penn Engineering Brings Two Coding Contests Together with HACKfest

On Friday, September 6, more than a thousand students from about 100 universities will descend upon the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science to take part in HACKfest, a series of student-run, weekend-long software and hardware design competitions w

Evan Lerner

Penn video game study helps identify new brain cell

Researchers in psychology and neuroscience are working to connect specific regions of the brain with behaviors and abilities that depend on them. While advances in non-invasive imaging technologies have propelled this interdisciplinary work forward, there is no substitute for directly recording the electrical activity of the living brain.

Evan Lerner

Penn Research Helps Identify New Brain Cell Involved in Navigation

Using direct human brain recordings, a research team from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Thomas Jefferson University has identified a new type of cell in the brain that helps people to keep track of their relative loc

Evan Lerner, Britt Faulstick

Penn Engineer Mark Harding Learns About Himself Via Teaching

(This is the second in a series about University of Pennsylvania students who took their arguments in support of federal student financial aid to Washington this summer in a project organized by the Office of Student Registration and Financial Services. Other profiles feature students Kristin Thomas and Mounica Gummadi.)

Evan Lerner

Penn study finds quality trumps quantity in language acquisition

The more parents speak to their children, the bigger their vocabularies are when they begin school. Research has indicated that richer parents speak to their children more often than poorer parents do, deepening the educational disadvantage facing many children living in poverty.

Evan Lerner

Penn Researchers Help Show New Way to Study and Improve Catalytic Reactions

Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process.

Evan Lerner

Nano-Noses at Penn Science Cafe

Physicist Charlie Johnson connects the biological to the digital, using graphene and carbon nanotubes to turn chemical interactions into electrical signals. Johnson will explain how attaching biological structures, such as antibodies, to these flat or rolled-up lattices of carbon atoms has enabled him and his colleagues to build new kinds of sensors, detecting things like Lyme disease bacteria.

Evan Lerner