• Homecoming 2025: Penn Engineering Faculty Lightning Talks

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    Amy Gutmann Hall, Auditorium 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Step back into the classroom with Penn Engineering! Join us for a series of TED Talk-style Lightning Talks featuring some of our most popular professors as they share their latest groundbreaking research. "Fragility and Resilience of the Soft Earth" Doug Jerolmack Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science […]

    PICS Colloquium: Influence of particle size distribution on random close packing with Eric Weeks

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    PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    The volume fraction phi for random close packed (RCP) spheres is approximately 0.64.  It is well known that higher RCP volume fractions are achieved by using collections of particles with a variety of sizes. The variety of sizes is often quantified by the polydispersity of the particle size distribution: the standard deviation of the radius […]

    ESE Guest Seminar – “Challenges and Opportunities in Radio Frequency Power Conversion for Semiconductor Plasma Applications”

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    CTA

    Radio frequency (RF) plasma technology is essential in modern semiconductor fabrication, enabling precise processes such as etching and deposition. As the industry advances toward increasingly complex three-dimensional structures and smaller nanoscale features, the demands on plasma-based processing continue to grow. Meeting these demands requires a new generation of RF power conversion and control systems that […]

    ESE Ph.D. Seminar: “Temporal Knockoffs: Variable selection for time-varying systems with e-processes”

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    Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    One of the primary goals of ‘explainable AI’ is the identification of a small subset of explanatory variables in an attempt to understand interesting phenomena. The Markov blanket constitutes one such subset, essential for tasks involving causal interpretation, prediction, and robustness. In medical imaging, identifying such variables is particularly important for achieving generalization across sites […]

    FOLDS SEMINAR: The Hidden Width of Deep ResNets

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

    Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/6130182858   We present a mathematical framework to analyze the training dynamics of deep ResNets that rigorously captures practical architectures (including Transformers) trained from standard random initializations. Our approach combines stochastic approximation of ODEs with propagation-of-chaos arguments to obtain tight convergence rates to the “infinite size” limit of the dynamics. It yields the […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Bioelastic State Recovery for Haptic Sensory Substitution”

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    The rich set of mechanoreceptors found in human skin offers a versatile engineering interface for transmitting information and eliciting perceptions, potentially serving a broad range of applications in patient care and other important industries. Targeted multisensory engagement of these afferent units, however, faces persistent challenges, especially for wearable, programmable systems that need to operate adaptively […]

    ESE Fall Seminar – “Engineering with Atomic-Scale Building Blocks: From Complex Properties to Functional Devices”

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    Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    As the demand for computing power and complexity continues to grow, developing new paradigms of information processing is essential. Unconventional functionalities arising from atomically engineered materials offer pathways to address these challenges. This has motivated the rapid development of atomic-scale materials as building blocks for future nanosystems. Their integration into functional devices, however, is hindered […]

    Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Martin Nisser, University of Washington, “Computational Fabrication and Assembly for In Situ Manufacturing”

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    Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.  ABSTRACT The space environment is remote and unpredictable, and the ability to manufacture in situ offers unique opportunities to address new challenges as they arise. However, the challenges faced in space are often mirrored on Earth. In hospitals, disaster […]

    CBE Seminar: “Engineering Soft Matter Systems through the Lens of Plant Physiology” (Jean-François Louf, Auburn University)

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    Wu & Chen Auditorium

    Abstract: Plants sense local pressure changes in their vasculature and transmit them across tissues via poroelastic coupling, triggering ionic currents in distant mechanosensitive cells to guide growth and biochemical responses. Inspired by this natural mechanotransduction, my lab develops synthetic analogs across soft materials. I will first present a soft robotic skin that mimics plant vasculature, […]