The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Riccardo Gottardi are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Paul Gehret. Title: “Decellularized Cartilage for Airway Repair”. Date: June 26, 2023 Time: 2:00 PM Location: Wu and Chen Auditorium in Levine Hall The public is welcome to attend. Join Zoom Meeting https://upenn.zoom.us/j/7937445851?pwd=RUJYZFNhOWVyRmM5QzZUb3FoaDRxZz09 […]
Multi-robot coordination and cooperation are critical behaviors that improve team performance and enable new tasks in application areas like autonomous construction, agriculture, and extended operation in large unknown regions. This talk explores the utility of graph-based modeling and computational frameworks to improve the coordination and cooperation of multi-robot teams in a variety of problems. I […]
A modular self-reconfigurable robot (MSRR) is a set of robotic building blocks that can be connected together in different ways. By rearranging these connections, the robot can adapt its shape to address a wider variety of tasks than a robot with a fixed morphology. However, traditional modular architectures fail to scale up to address large-scale […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Louis Soslowsky are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Joseph Newton. Title: Novel Applications of In Vivo Assays, Microdialysis and Photoacoustic Ultrasound, Throughout Rat Achilles Tendon Injury and Healing Date and Time: June 29th, 10:00am EST Location: CRB Austrian Auditorium Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/93571878070?pwd=c2NIN1A5Zmw2M0lZSnQ0d3hmMG52UT09 The […]
2D materials is a rapidly expanding class of materials that have captivated academia and industry with their ultrathin nature and remarkable properties. Graphene, the first discovered material, shows exceptional mechanical strength and superior electrical properties, presenting exciting probabilities in many applications. Combined with its large surface area and biocompatibility, graphene is particularly promising for the […]
Aneuploidy, a cancer hallmark, has intrigued researchers due to its near-universal presence in cancer. However, studying its impact is challenging due to the involvement of numerous genes and the difficulty in creating suitable models. Advances in sequencing technology and the vast data available in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) enabled us to use the p53-null […]
Engineers in modern society are taught to design and build structures and robots from pre-processed materials, giving them the ability to describe the operating capacity of their structure with a high degree of certainty. From a disaster recovery and robust systems point of view, this is a severe limitation. Rather than use processed material of […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Louis Soslowsky are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Thomas Leahy. Title: "In Situ and In Vivo Roles of Focal Adhesion Kinase in Tendon Development and Mechanotransduction" Date: July 7, 2023 Time: 2:00PM Location: CRB Austrian Auditorium Zoom link The public is welcome to attend.
Non-equilibrium phenomena are ubiquitous across material systems and of great technological relevance. Examples of such phenomena include diffusion processes in liquid and gases, viscoelasticity and plasticity in solids, and rheological behavior of colloidal and granular media. Despite their ubiquity and importance, the understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena remains in its infancy compared with classical equilibrium thermodynamics […]
Mapping and navigation have gone hand-in-hand since long before robots existed. For almost as long, maps have also been a key form of communication, allowing someone who has never been to an area to nonetheless navigate that area successfully. In the context of multi-robot systems, the maps and information that flow between robots are what […]
Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the active metric-semantic mapping problem that enables multiple heterogeneous robots to collaboratively build a map of the environment. The robots actively explore to minimize […]
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Dennis Discher are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Brandon Hayes. Title: Macrophages & chromosomal instability: From unraveling immunomodulatory interactions to effects of chromosomal instability on macrophage-mediated anti-tumor response Date: July 11, 2023 Time: 10:00am Location: Berger Auditorium in Skirkanich The public […]
Microorganisms, primitive unicellular forms of life, form the basis of the food web and play crucial roles in the Earth's biogeochemical cycles. Habitats of microorganisms, from oceans and lakes to soil and human intestines, are often characterized by constant fluid motion. Fluid flow exerts forces and torques on microorganisms that affect their movement and distribution, […]
This thesis is dedicated to addressing the challenges of robust collaborative learning and optimization in both discrete and continuous domains. With the ever-increasing scale of data and the growing demand for effective distributed learning, a multitude of obstacles emerge, including communication limitations, resilience to failures and corrupted data, limited information access, and collaboration in multi-task […]
Advanced functional materials comprising multiple components with nano- and microscopic features typically rely on expensive and time-consuming fabrication methods. Kinetically-trapped disordered structures provide a powerful alternate route to fabricate fault-tolerant, multi-component functional structures at scale. Developing such structures with controllable features that could serve as materials templates for various applications is of great importance. Bicontinuous […]
Blood clotting is primarily responsible for stemming bleeding in vessel injury, comprising a protective mechanism called hemostasis. However, if a blood clot forms within a blood vessel when or where it is not needed, this can result in death and disability. Blood clots and thrombi are composed of blood cells embedded into a polymeric fibrin […]
Actuator reduction is especially important for aerial robots, where minimizing mass and conserving power is critical. Bistable mechanisms have been used to augment actuators by speeding up actuation time or allowing one direction of actuation to be passive. In this talk we will explore how bistable mechanisms can reduce the number of actuators needed in […]
There is currently a critical need for blood donors, and members of the Penn Engineering community are invited to participate in a school-wide blood drive. To join in this effort, please RSVP using this link.
Structural design optimization has long played a crucial role in engineering, often with the goal of creating stiff and lightweight structures for aerospace and other applications. However, optimizing structures against failure is also crucial and has been much less well explored. Failure via fracture and at interfaces is particularly challenging in design optimization as they […]
Emerging 3D memory technologies, such as the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), provide high bandwidth and massive memory-level parallelism. With the growing heterogeneity and complexity of computer systems (CPU cores and accelerators, etc.), efficiently integrating emerging memories into existing systems poses new challenges to both algorithm, hardware and system. This dissertation […]
