George Pappas Receives IEEE Kirchmayer Award News / July 14, 2025 Every year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recognizes an individual for the “inspirational mentoring” of graduate students. This year, the Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award was presented to George Pappas, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation in Electrical and Systems Engineering, who serves as both Penn Engineering’s... Read More
Lighting the Spark: Summer STEM at Penn Engineering News / June 25, 2025 Every summer, Penn Engineering turns into an engine of opportunity for hundreds of Philadelphia students like Tamara Brockington who joined the Electronic Photonic Microsystems Lab as part of Penn Engineering’s Army Education Outreach Program (AEOP) High School Internship Program. Read More
Unlocking the Mechanics of Protein Misfolding News / June 3, 2025 Prions, mysterious shape-shifting proteins, can lead to brain disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, “mad cow disease” in cattle, yet they can also play essential roles in yeast survival and long-term memory formation in mice. Given their wide-ranging and complicated effects, investigating their structure and... Read More
Designing the Future: Penn Engineering’s 2025 Senior Design Project Competition News / May 12, 2025 Consider the following problems: Every year, millions of people struggle to recover mobility following strokes. Hundreds of millions need eye exams, but live far from practicing optometrists. Billions of tires expire, leaching toxic chemicals into the food chain. And as AI systems grow larger, they require more and more power... Read More
Adventures in Innovation: Penn Engineering Startups Lead Venture Lab Challenge News / May 6, 2025 To form a venture is, quite literally, to go on an adventure. The words have the same Latin root, meaning to head toward what is to come. On Friday, a trio of Penn Engineering startups demonstrated their aptitude for navigating the unknown by taking home more than $100,000 at the... Read More
Rob Ghrist: The Soul of an Artist, the Mind of a Mathematician News / May 5, 2025 Ghrist’s signature blend of aesthetic flair and mathematical rigor is transforming how students see — and shape — the world of high-dimensional data. Read More
Innovation & Impact Podcast: The Future of AI with Yann LeCun News / April 29, 2025 Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun joined Dean Vijay Kumar on Penn Engineering's "Innovation and Impact" podcast to discuss the evolution of AI, how we define intelligence and the possibilities and challenges it presents. Read More
How MLR@Penn Supports Student AI Researchers News / April 17, 2025 Last year, researchers published over 50,000 papers on machine learning — a nearly 50% jump from the previous year. “Figuring out what’s worth reading is hard,” says Alok Shah (CIS’26, ESE’26, C’26), president of Machine Learning Research @ Penn (MLR@Penn), a club that helps students stay on top of fast-moving... Read More
Penn Engineers First to Train AI at Lightspeed News / April 15, 2025 Penn Engineers have built the first photonic chip capable of training neural networks using light alone, opening the door to ultra-fast, ultra-efficient AI. Read More
The ASSET Center Advances Trustworthy AI with Support from AWS News / April 9, 2025 As AI continues to evolve, its integration into safety-critical domains, such as autonomous vehicles or medical diagnosis tools, has raised pressing concerns. Current machine learning algorithms can offer statistical guarantees, but they do not always provide the predictable behavior required for high-risk applications. Additionally, beyond just making predictions, AI systems... Read More
