Innovation | Penn Today

Nikil Ragav smiles and leans casually on a tree

Nikil Ragav wants to bring high-tech, hands-on learning to all students

The President’s Innovation Prize winner wants to bring high-tech, hands-on learning to students of all backgrounds across the country with inventXYZ.

A robot resembling a toy car attached to a pole turns round and round over a surface covered in hydrogel.

New scavenger technology allows robots to ‘eat’ metal for energy

Penn Engineering researchers’ new metal-air scavenger vehicle gets energy from breaking chemical bonds in the aluminum surface it travels over, rather than from batteries.

Rapid response to COVID-19 puts the power of innovation to the test

With a critical need for equipment that can help protect frontline healthcare workers, the Penn community has come together to help fabricate 20,000 face shields by mid- to late-April.

DIY origami face masks for COVID-19

The professor of materials science and engineering and chemical and biomolecular engineering is leading an effort to design an effective face mask that can be made at home.

Yumin Gao, Leo Li, Minhal Dhanjy, Darsham Bhosale, Kateryna Kharenko and Ryan Goethals (clockwise from top left) pose with their prototypes and trophies.

Scrap metal-powered lights win Y-Prize 2020

The winning team of this year’s Y-Prize, an invention competition in which entrants are challenged to pitch an innovative business plan for a technology developed at Penn Engineering, Metal Light, proposes technology to provide illumination for houses not connected to electrical grids.

View of white garments hanging at the Designs for Different Futures exhibit, with a white shirt on a stand and a futuristic wheelchair and mechanical upright walking device on display.

Designs for what the future can be

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Designs for Different Futures” exhibition includes contributions and installations from several Penn faculty and alumni who seek to answer questions about what the not-so-distant future may look like.

Hand holding a magnifying glass over back of disassembled smartphone

Engineers collaborate to create electroadhesive grippers

A collaborative team has developed a method for electroadhesion—which exploits the same phenomenon as static cling—to manipulate microscale objects.

An artist’s illustration of nanoparticles transporting mRNA into a T cell, allowing the latter to express surface receptors that recognize cancer cells.

Penn nanoparticles are less toxic to T cells engineered for cancer immunotherapy

By using messenger RNA across the T cell’s membrane via a nanoparticle instead of a DNA-rewriting virus on extracted T cells, CAR T treatments could have fewer side effects.

a person walking through a line of curved TV screens with forest pictures

Q&A

The future of innovation in consumer technology

Wharton’s David Hsu discusses what the recent Consumer Electronics Show says about the consumer technology landscape and what innovations will become prevalent in the future.

Tough conversations and innovative outlooks in higher ed

President Amy Gutmann and Graduate School of Education scholar Robert Zemsky took part in a “fireside chat” at this year’s Higher Education Leadership Conference at Penn, which also awarded Gutmann the Zemsky Medal.

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