School of Engineering & Applied Science

A scar might be a reminder of an accident or surgery, but the fibrous tissue that makes up a scar also forms after a heart attack and arises in solid tumors as well as in chronic diseases such as liver cirrhosis and muscular dystrophy. Implanted medical devices and materials are similarly surrounded by fibrous capsules that impede their function.  

WHO:     Danielle BassettSkirkanich Assistant Professor of InnovationDepartment of BioengineeringDepartment of Electrical and Systems EngineeringSchool of Engineering and Applied Science

Investigators at a new University of Pennsylvania research center will focus on key physical principles that underpin cancer’s development and growth.

Penn Electric Racing has taken home top honors at an international competition.

Social networks affect every aspect of our lives, from the jobs we get and the technologies we adopt to the partners we choose and the healthiness of our lifestyles. But where do they come from? 

The University of Pennsylvania today announced a partnership with leading nonprofit online learning platform edX, expanding the University’s open learning course offerings to reach millions of additional learners worldwide.

Picking things up and putting them down is a mainstay of any kind of manufacturing, but fingers, human or robotic, are not always best for the task at hand.    

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone In any textbook diagram, a group of red blood cells, skin cells or nerve cells will typically be identical in size. But, just as no two people are quite the same height and weight, in a population of real cells there are larger and smaller individuals.

Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould is famous for describing the evolution of humans and other conscious beings as a chance accident of history. If we could go back millions of years and “run the tape of life again,” he mused, evolution would follow a different path. 

Crystalline materials have atoms that are neatly lined up in a repeating pattern. When they break, that failure tends to start at a defect, or a place where the pattern is disrupted. But how do defect-free materials break?