• MEAM Seminar: “The Role of YAP and TAZ in Regulating Mechanical Load-induced Bone Adaptation and Osteocytes Mechanosensing”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Fetal movements and physical activities generate mechanical signals that regulate musculoskeletal development. It is widely accepted that a bone’s adaptive response occurs within an optimal strain range that stimulates bone formation, exceeding typical daily activity levels. This principle has led to models predicting how bones respond to mechanical loads, as insufficient mechanical signals can result […]

    CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: “Leveraging confinement and surface effects to control polymer phase behavior and transport phenomena in polymer-infiltrated nanoparticle films” (Trevor Devine)

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    Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Abstract: Highly loaded, polymer-infiltrated nanoparticle films (PINFs) enable the synergistic combination of polymers with the functionality of nanoscale fillers. Extensive studies have found that their behavior deviates markedly from bulk polymers due to extreme confinement and high interfacial area within the interstitial pore network. However, incorporating polymer blends in these PINFs (blend-PINFs) is unexplored. Confinement […]

    Summer 2025 GRASP Seminar: “Brain orchestra in resting-state: Identifying communication modules from the functional architecture of area V1”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in AGH 306 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT How does the brain perform the complicated computations that allow us to learn about and interact with the environment? The rapid advances in optical imaging, machine learning, and the availability of computational resources, provide a unique opportunity to […]

    MSE Ph.D. Thesis: “Metasurfaces For Environmental Refractive Index Sensing: Design, Fabrication And Interrogation”

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    Towne 327 the Active Learning Classroom

    Metasurfaces are artificial materials composed of sub-wavelength building blocks whose size, shape, periodicity and composition are tailored to engineer their optical response and achieve arbitrary control of their interactions with light. Their phase discontinuities or resonances are critically dependent upon the local dielectric or refractive index environment, thus making metasurfaces excellent candidates as refractive index […]

    MEAM Seminar: “SLAM in Hard Places”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Simultaneous Localization and Mapping is a fundamental problem for robots interacting with a novel environment and has been a densely studied area of research for several decades. The modern paradigm of feature extraction and matching coupled with advancements in sensor technology have allowed robots to achieve sub meter localization accuracy over kilometer long trajectories in […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Tunable Dielectric Nanocrystal Metasurfaces for Colorimetric Sensing”

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    Room 313, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Optical metasurfaces enable strong light–matter interactions, making them ideal platforms for high–figure-of-merit (FOM) sensing. When fabricated from colloidal nanocrystal dispersions, these metasurfaces offer unique advantages in fabrication flexibility, reconfigurability, and cost-effectiveness. However, conventional fabrication approaches often rely on toxic material systems. In this thesis, we enhance the FOM of titanium dioxide (TiO₂)-based dielectric metasurfaces by […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Discrete and Continuous Modeling of Fibrous Biological Materials: Compressible Large Deformations, Damage, and Crack Propagation”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Random fiber networks are integral to biological materials such as the extracellular matrix, cytoskeleton, and blood clots. A random fiber network is the main structural component of the extracellular matrix, the cytoskeleton, and our blood clots. The mechanical behavior of these materials is characterized by large deformations, non-linear stress-strain response, and large compressibility. Experimental and […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Mechanical Interfaces for Health: From Mechanobiology to Tactile Perception”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Our lab combines adhesion and tribology with modern polymers and surface coatings to understand soft interfaces in biology towards improving human health and accessibility. On the scale of cells, mechanical stiffness of cells and tissue can indicate diseases like fibrosis or osteoarthritis. On the scale of the human body, mechanical forces generated by friction form […]

    Summer 2025 GRASP Seminar: Antonino Furnari, University of Catania, “Towards an Embodied Understanding of Human Behaviour with Egocentric Vision”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 306 3317 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in AGH 306 and virtual attendance via Zoom. ABSTRACT The last few years are witnessing a major shift in the way we think of computing, with humans relying more and more on AI assistants which speak their language and understand images and videos. While this revolution has […]

    ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Statistical Limits and Efficient Algorithms for Learning-Enabled Control”

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, United States

    As the adoption of large-scale learning for control continues to grow, developing sample-efficient algorithms has become critical. Yet, even in simple settings, algorithms achieving optimal sample complexity for specific problem instances often remain unknown. Motivated by this limitation, we discuss recent progress toward understanding sample-efficient methods in learning-enabled control. We first examine the statistical limits […]

    AI Across the Care Spectrum: From Bench to Bed (Webinar)

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    Join Penn AI on June 18 @ 2PM for an exciting webinar exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming every corner of healthcare—from dental exams to home care, medical imaging to gerontology, and beyond. Hear directly from leading experts including  as they dive into the real-world impact of AI in their fields, the challenges of implementing […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Elastomeric Strain Limitation for Design of Soft Pneumatic Actuators”

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    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Modern robots embody power and precision control, yet as robots undertake tasks that apply forces on humans this power brings risk of injury. Soft robotic actuators use deformation to produce smooth, continuous motions and conform to delicate objects while imparting forces capable of safely pushing humans. This thesis presents strategies for the design, modeling, and […]