School of Engineering & Applied Science

(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.)

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.

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.

Rajeev Alur and Randall Kamien of the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded five-year, $500,000 grants from the Simons Foundation, as part of its 2013 class of Simons Investigators.

For a select group of engineering undergraduates in the Rachleff Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania, summer will be spent conducting research that ranges from robotics to cancer cells.

The University of Pennsylvania has been named a project site for the Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, a multiyear, multimillion dollar project that aims to improve the quality of education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Dawn A. Bonnell has been named vice provost for research at the University of Pennsylvania, effective July 1.

Mark G. Allen has been named the inaugural scientific director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology. 

The quintessential piece of origami might be a decorative paper crane, but in the hands of an interdisciplinary University of Pennsylvania research team, it could lead to a drug-delivery device, an emergency shelter, or even a space station.

Cartilage injuries are difficult to repair. Current surgical options generally involve taking a piece from another part of the injured joint and patching over the damaged area, but this approach involves damaging healthy cartilage, and a person’s cartilage may still deteriorate with age.