School of Engineering & Applied Science

The field of metamaterials, an intersection of materials science, physics, nanotechnology and electrical engineering, aims to produce structures with unusual electromagnetic properties. Through the careful combination of multiple materials in a precise periodic arrangement, the resulting metamaterials exhibit properties that otherwise couldn’t exist, such as a negative index of refraction.

Beginning in April, Penn Engineering and the GRASP Laboratory will offer a new series of online courses in robotics as part of edX’s “MicroMasters” program.

Scientists have gotten better at predicting where earthquakes will occur, but they’re still in the dark about when they will strike and how devastating they will be.

When John Crocker, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science was a graduate student, his advisor gathered together everyone in his lab to “throw down the gauntlet” on a new challenge in the field.

In order for cancer to spread, malignant cells must break away from a tumor and through the tough netting of extracellular matrix, or ECM, that surrounds it. To fit through the holes in this net, those cancerous cells must elongate into a torpedo-like shape.

A team is using commercially available nanotechnology to develop a low-cost, handheld diagnostic device that can monitor HIV. This device would increase access to high-quality treatment of HIV in developing countries and lower the cost of health care in the U.S.

University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.

Nanoscale structures have properties that can’t be achieved in any other way, stemming from precise control over the structure’s composition and geometry. Unfortunately, simultaneously achieving high levels of control of both characteristics can be challenging.

University of Pennsylvania senior Lucy Chai of Acton, Mass., has received a Churchill Scholarship from the Winston Churchill Foundation.  She is among 15 recipients of the honor, awarded annually to American students to fund a year of master’s study in science, mathematics and engineering

The round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode, is a puzzling creature.