$2.6M NIH Grant Backs Search for Genetic Cure in Deadly Heart Disease News / July 7, 2025 Fourteen million people worldwide suffer from enlarged hearts, or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a genetic disease that thickens the heart’s walls, making it harder for the organ to pump blood — but many of them don’t know it. The disease is often undiagnosed, despite being the most common genetic heart disease... Read More
Researchers crack the code of body’s ancient immune defense News / June 18, 2025 How does your body distinguish friendly visitors, like medications and medical devices, from dangerous invaders such as viruses and other infectious agents? The answer lies in a protein network dating back half a billion years—before humans diverged from sea urchins, notes Jacob Brenner, a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.... 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
Meet Jean, Penn Engineering’s AI Tutor, Available 24/7 News / April 23, 2025 Imagine that you’re a first-year student in the Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) program, Penn Engineering’s most popular online degree. You’ve spent hours on a coding assignment, only to encounter the same bug, over and over. You could post a question on the online discussion board, but, like... Read More
Zixuan Yi: A ‘Question-Driven’ Approach to Improving AI and Machine Learning News / April 11, 2025 In any business, time is money. So it’s hardly surprising that many sectors have embraced systems powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): these tools promise to make time-consuming processes more efficient. Zixuan Yi, a second-year doctoral student in Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the PRECISE (Penn... Read More
Responsible Innovation Starts Here: A Holistic Approach to Engineering Education News / April 7, 2025 With guidance from faculty experts, students develop the “ethics toolkit” they’ll rely on as future leaders in science and technology. Read More
Evaluating Large Language Models for Cyberbullying Behavior News / March 27, 2025 Ph.D. students in Penn’s Brachio Lab have been assessing the safety of machine learning systems for real-world uses like economic forecasting, cultural politeness, and legal reasoning. In their work, a new focus area has emerged: The extent to which large language models (LLMs) are capable of cyberbullying behavior—and how to debug where... Read More
Scientists Unlock Frogs’ Antibacterial Secrets to Combat Superbugs News / March 25, 2025 Frogs have thrived for hundreds of millions of years, spreading across virtually every corner of the earth, from tropical jungles to subarctic forests. Throughout their evolution, they have developed remarkable defenses — including previously unreported antibiotics — against the hordes of bacteria that thrive in their moist environments. Variants of... Read More
Combining AI and Art-making for Youth Well-being News / March 7, 2025 After gaining experience as a qualitative researcher in public health, Eileen Feng mused about how she might take that knowledge and apply it to product design. She sought out a program soon after completing a master’s program in public health, finding her fit with the Integrated Product Design master’s program, a joint... Read More
