School of Engineering & Applied Science

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These posts, many of which are submitted late at night or in the early morning hours, often reveal mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.

The minor, spearheaded by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, includes courses from a broad range of departments, from Anthropology to Religious Studies.