The Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics undergraduate curriculum gives our students hands-on, real world lab work in addition to a strong background in theoretical knowledge. The addition of interactive, design-centered assignments is creating educational experiences that are preparing Penn’s mechanical engineers for the problems they will solve in industry and research.

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Featured News

Penn4C Announces Awardees for Community-led Partnership Grant

The Penn Community Collaboratory for Co-Creation (Penn4C), an initiative led jointly by the Welcome to Penn Nursing (Penn Nursing) and the School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering), has awarded funding to five new research projects that address social justice through designing and implementing solutions to improve health, well-being and safety. In addition to the involvement of Penn faculty and students, the projects are required to have active and equitable representation of the community in which the project will be completed. “Penn4C gets engineers actively involved in ways that make a real impact as projects are driven by the community,” adds Mark Yim, Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Penn Engineering, Director of the GRASP Lab and Co-Director of Penn4C. READ MORE

Behind the Scenes: A PhD in MEAM

Meet Julia Radzio, a third year PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department. Radzio is co-advised between MEAM Professor Paulo Arratia and Professor David Issadore in Bioengineering with a focus on designing continuous flow and droplet-based microfluidic devices for the design and development of therapeutic drugs. In this quick interview, Radzio walks us through her PhD experience, from what initially drew her to pursue a PhD, balancing work and other commitments, and advice for prospective students.

Prior to Penn, Radzio graduated with her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and worked as a researcher in the Kirby Microfluidics Lab. She was also a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, 2021-2023. WATCH VIDEO

The Future of Farming

Introducing Ari Bortman

Penn Receives $2 Million NASA Grant for TRUSSES Project to Study Lunar Robotics

The University of Pennsylvania has been awarded a $2 million NASA grant for the TRUSSES Project, led by Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor, Cynthia Sung, aiming to advance lunar robotics.

“Future lunar exploration demands the ability to navigate challenging terrains, including steep slopes, loose regolith and potentially ice,” says Sung. “Our research will focus on developing new algorithms that allow robots to estimate ground properties through locomotion, enabling them to autonomously assess traversal risk and recover from any navigation failures.” READ MORE

The Alchemy Behind the Diamond: Unearthing Baseball’s Beloved Mud

Douglas Jerolmack, Professor in Earth and Environmental Science and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), is working with other researchers at Penn to reverse-engineer the mud used on baseballs and offer a mechanistic understanding of its inner workings. “Before every game, baseballs are massaged with this mud which gives it a grip-friendly veneer to the otherwise slippery sphere,” he says. READ MORE

Oren Minsk: A 2024 Matthew Isakowitz Fellow

A Centimeter-Scale Quadruped Leverages Curved-Crease Origami

Centimeter-scale walking and crawling robots are in demand both for their ability to explore tight or cluttered environments and for their low fabrication costs. Now, pulling from origami-inspired construction, researchers led by Cynthia Sung, Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in MEAM, have crafted a more simplified approach to the design and fabrication of these robots. READ MORE

Penn Engineering’s GRASP Lab Helps Lead $5M Effort to Accelerate Robotics Research

Mark Yim, Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering in MEAM, will help lead a $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) effort to accelerate human-robotic-interface by designing a humanoid robot to distribute to the scientific community. In collaboration with investigators at Oregon State University (OSU) and Semio, the goal for the program is to drive discovery and learning in computing and communication foundations, computer and network systems, and information and intelligent systems.

Penn Engineering’s primary contribution to the project will be the design of the new robot, Quori Version 2, while OSU will lead the forming of the human-robot-interaction research community. READ MORE

 

MEAM News

ROBO Alumni Took a SICK Trip to Germany

03.04.2024 | Read More

Penn4C Announces Awardees for Community-led Partnership Grant

02.20.2024 | Read More

Penn Engineering Announces First Ivy League Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

02.13.2024 | Read More

MEAM Events

MEAM Seminar: “Designing Heart Valves from First Principles: Model Generation, Congenital Disease and Surgical Treatment”

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Rigorous and Glamorous in 100 Words or Less: An Abstract Workshop

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MEAM Seminar: “Surfactants, Colloids, and Electrolytes: Engineering Transport Phenomena for Energy and the Environment”

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Announcement

The MEAM Blog is LIVE!

We are happy to announce that the MEAM Blog is officially live. This page will serve as a one-stop-shop for all news related to MEAM. Head over to check out our latest stories!

Welcome!

Welcome to Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at Penn! We are a vibrant, dynamic, diverse, and interactive community. We focus on our high-caliber undergraduate and graduate programs, which combine rigorous education in the fundamentals with hands-on projects and research into novel problems and advanced applications.


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