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Stentix wins the 2025 Y-Prize
Winners of Penn’s 2025 Y-Prize holding their certificates.

The Stentix team (top) Summer Cobb and Amanda Kossoff, (bottom) Aarsha Shah and Elizabeth Jia, with judges (descending left) Matt Fitz-Henry, Jason Smith, Jennifer Gilburg, and Sasha Schrode, and (descending right) David Hsu, Gerald Lopez, and Dean Miller.

(Image: Courtesy of the William and Phyllis Mack Institute for Innovation Management)

Stentix wins the 2025 Y-Prize

The winning team of Penn Engineering’s annual award for entrepreneurial technology have created a noninvasive mechanism to adjust medical stent positioning using magnetic reconfiguration.

From the William and Phyllis Mack Institute for Innovation Management

Is Moore’s Law really dead?
A semiconductor wafer.

According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years.

(Image: iStock/SweetBunFactory)

Is Moore’s Law really dead?

Penn Engineering’s Ben Lee and André DeHon discuss Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost, and reflect on the consequences and opportunities of its possible end.

Devorah Fischler

Quantum communications
 3D rendering of artist's interpretation of quantum entanglement.

Leveraging principles of quantum mechanics to securely transmit messages has promised a revolution in encryption, keeping sensitive information secure. Now, a collaborative team of researchers including the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Liang Feng and Ph.D. candidate Yichi Zhang have developed a system that enables more stable, robust, high-efficiency, and long-range quantum communication—paving the way for practical, high-dimensional quantum networks.

(Image: Courtesy of Jian Fan)

Quantum communications

Penn and CUNY researchers collaborated to develop a device that uses quantum principles to relay information securely—an advance that could improve encryption in critical service areas like banking and health care.
Borrowing nature’s blueprint: How scientists replicated bone marrow
A chip with bioengineered bone marrow.

The new chip will allow for automated experiments, and can be connected to chip-based models of other organ systems, like the lungs.

(Image: Dan Huh)

Borrowing nature’s blueprint: How scientists replicated bone marrow

A collaborative research team from Penn Engineering, Penn Medicine, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have developed a chip that mimics human bone marrow.

Ian Scheffler

BEND lipids improve LNP mRNA delivery and gene editing
A gloved hand holding a beaker of lipids in a lab.

A sample of the new lipids, which improve the success rate of lipid nanoparticles delivering their contents.

(Image: Sylvia Zhang)

BEND lipids improve LNP mRNA delivery and gene editing

Penn Engineering researchers have developed a new class of lipids called branched endosomal disruptor (BEND) lipids to better deliver mRNA and gene-editing tools.

Ian Scheffler

New ways to modulate cell activity remotely
3D rendering of cells on a blue backdrop

Cells are dynamic, fast-changing, complex, tiny, and often hard-to-see in environments that don’t always behave in predictable ways when exposed to external stimuli. Now, researchers led by Lukasz Bugaj of the School of Engineering and Applied Science have found new ways to modulate cell activity remotely.

(Image: iStock/Maksim Tkachenko)

New ways to modulate cell activity remotely

Penn researchers use temperature to guide cellular behavior, promising better diagnostics and targeted therapies.
Breakthroughs in gene editing and expression control with mvGPT
Tyler Daniel using a pipette in a bioengineering lab.

Sherry Gao, Tyler Daniel (pictured), and their coauthors have developed a new tool that can simultaneously and independently edit multiple genes and regulate their expression.

(Image: Bella Ciervo)

Breakthroughs in gene editing and expression control with mvGPT

Penn Engineers have created a gene editing tool that can address different genetic diseases in the same cell.

Ian Scheffler

A less clumpy, more complex universe?
Dark energy telescope with star trails

A less clumpy, more complex universe?

Researchers combined cosmological data from two major surveys of the universe’s evolutionary history and found that it may have become “messier and complicated” than expected in recent years.