Penn Engineering Events

Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Binghao Huang, Columbia University, "Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation"
2025-10-01 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Tactile and visual perception are crucial for fine-grained human interactions with the environment. Developing similar multimodal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation skills. This talk presents a scalable tactile stack that couples flexible, large-area tactile skin with multimodal perception and simulation-driven learning. (1) Hardware. I will first introduce a low-cost, flexible tactile “skin,” outline the associated design choices, explain why I value it over other sensors in different contexts, and describe how I integrate it into the system to ensure high-quality tactile data. (2) Learning. Vision and touch have distinct natures yet are both important for robot decision making; I will explain how we encode tactile and visual data so that both contribute effectively to the decision-making process. (3) Scaling up Tactile Data. I will present two directions: (i) using portable tactile devices to collect large-scale real-world tactile data and leveraging this dataset to enhance policy learning, and (ii) leveraging tactile simulation to increase policy robustness. We use a real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that calibrates a GPU-parallel tactile simulation and uses RL fine-tuning to let policies explore with the small corrective “wiggling” behaviors required for tight-fit bimanual assembly.

ASSET Seminar: "Title TBD"
2025-10-01 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Abstract TBD

Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98963621993

MEAM Seminar: "Taking Advantage of Coherent Vortex Wakes: Formation Flight and High Density Tidal Energy Harvesting"
2025-09-30 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wake flows – the fluid mechanical “debris” shed behind an aerodynamic body – are often characterized by unsteady, turbulent, low-momentum fluid. Usually these wakes are to be avoided, but in several situations the wake can exhibit an organized structure consisting of well-defined high energy vortices. Examples of these coherent, or structured, wakes include trailing vortex flows behind animals in flight or swimming fish as well as the vortices shed behind wings pitching to high angles of attack. In this talk I will illustrate several examples of structured wakes in both natural and engineered systems, drawing from several projects from our lab including measurements of enhanced renewable energy harvesting using arrays of oscillating flow turbines, and energy savings experienced by birds flying in small flocks.

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Engineering Multiphasic Processes to Enhance Droplet Microfluidics and Biofuel Conversion" (Owen Land)
2025-09-29 14:00 - 16:00 | Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121, 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:

Multiphasic processes underpin nearly every aspect of modern life; from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the medicines that sustain us and the energy systems that power our world. This thesis presents three contributions to the advancement of multiphasic processes by developing intelligent control, scalable processing, and reactor design. First, artificial intelligence is applied to droplet and bubble microfluidics through convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the form of soft-sensors. Coupled with proportional–integral–derivative (PID) feedback loops, these sensors enable autonomous control of droplet size and flow regimes, maintaining stable operation under disturbances and recovering from failure modes without operator intervention. The framework is further extended to complex geometries, including double emulsions and anisotropic hydrogel rods, demonstrating adaptability across several multiphase microfluidic systems. Second, a sliding film evaporator (SFE) is developed as a continuous method for solvent removal from PLGA emulsions. By spreading emulsions into thin films across temperature-controlled channels, the SFE accelerates chloroform removal while maintaining particle uniformity, overcoming the inconsistency and scalability limitations of traditional evaporation techniques. Finally, bubble-mediated transesterification reactors are developed for biodiesel synthesis from algae-derived triglycerides. Methanol microbubbles enhance interfacial mass transfer and lower the apparent activation energy, enabling >95% conversion under moderate conditions. Kinetic studies coupled with ASPEN PLUS simulations demonstrate reactor scalability, while highlighting the importance of diffuser design and continuous glycerol removal. Together, these contributions provide a pathway to the continual improvement of multiphasic process engineering.

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Gas Encapsulating Microcapsules (GEMs)" (CK Yeh)
2025-09-29 12:00 - 14:00 | Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Room 121, 231 S 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:

Microcapsules that can respond under hydrostatic pressure would open a new avenue of application in ultrasound- or impact-induced release of therapeutic agents. While microcapsules that are designed to release cargo under uniaxial compressive loadings have been developed, they are filled with liquid, rendering them insensitive to hydrostatic pressure. To overcome this limitation, bubbles can be introduced into the core of the capsule that can impart hydrostatic pressure sensitivity. Although microcapsules that contain bubbles have been reported, the methods for their fabrication make it difficult to control the size of the bubble and microcapsule. In this work, we use microfluidics to create uniform microcapsules while also utilizing osmosis-induced-cavitation to convert microcapsules into gas-encapsulating microcapsules (GEMs). Following GEMs formation under high salt concentrations, the size of the bubble can be modulated by placing the GEMs back into relatively lower salt concentrations. GEMs with a well-defined thickness to diameter ratio (t/D) and volume fraction of gas are subjected to a known hydrostatic pressure through the means of a drop tower. These data establish a relationship between how the thickness to diameter ratio and volume fraction of bubble influence the rupture pressure and drug release, helping to establish the foundation for a new class of on-demand therapeutics that take advantage of pressure inputs.

MSE PhD Defense: "Integrated Photonics for Intelligent Parameter Retrieval"
2025-09-29 11:30 - 12:30 | Room 313, Singh Center for Nanotechnology, 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Thesis Committee:
Prof. Liang Feng (Chair)
Prof. Firooz Aflatouni
Prof. Ritesh Agarwal
Prof. I-Wei Chen

Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/2449152154

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "Pneumatic Actuation in Soft Robotic System"
2025-09-26 15:00 - 16:00 | CTA
Soft robotic systems, constructed from compliant and adaptive materials, offer advantages such as safe interaction with humans, flexibility in motion, and the ability to conform to unstructured environments. These capabilities make them promising for applications in healthcare, manufacturing, and exploration. A central challenge, however, is the development of actuation strategies that are versatile, efficient, and capable of integrating sensing and control.
This dissertation investigates pneumatic actuation as a broad platform for advancing soft robotic systems. Pneumatic systems naturally couple deformation with pressure signals, enabling not only motion generation but also embedded feedback and logic. Three representative studies are presented: the design of pneumatic actuators that support diverse motion behaviors, the development of stimuli-responsive valves that achieve autonomous environmental interaction, and the creation of pneumatically controlled lattices that demonstrate tunable mechanical properties.
Together, these works highlight the role of pneumatic actuation as more than a source of force, showing how it can support adaptability, responsiveness, and structural intelligence in soft systems, while pointing toward future directions in miniaturization and simplified pneumatic control.

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "Mechanical Confinement as a Driver of Aneuploidy in Cancer" (Steven Phan)
2025-09-26 10:30 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:

Cell confinement and mechanical stress are common in solid tumors, but any impact on genetic changes remains unclear. Using chromosome reporters (ChReporters) that reveal heritable losses of chromosomes in live cells, we discover that ChReporter losses are surprisingly equivalent when cells are subjected to either mild confinement (6-10µm) or strong confinement (2µm). Strong confinement causes interphase nuclear rupture in most cells, whereas mild confinement suffices to perturb mitotic spindles, prolong pro/metaphase, and induce micronuclei. However, micronuclei that form upon chromosome mis-segregation in mitosis do not emerge during mild confinement but do emerge following release – indicating a mitotic memory of the confined state. Live cell imaging post-confinement revealed that mitotic cells and their daughters also tend to arrest or die. Delayed induction of micronuclei and ChReporter loss are phenocopied by transient disruption of microtubules. Inhibition of cell cycle entry using a clinically deployed CDK4/6-inhibitor further shows ChReporter loss requires mitosis and inhibitor washout increases ChReporter loss. Consistent with a memory of spindle confinement, single cell RNA-sequencing demonstrates enrichment of chromosome segregation factors long after confinement.

BE Seminar - Bozhi Tian, "Physical Biology Strategies for Translational Bioelectrical Interfaces"
2025-09-25 15:30 - 16:30 | 216 Moore Building

FOLDS seminar: Propagation-of-Chaos in Shallow Neural Networks beyond Logarithmic Time.
2025-09-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722
The analysis of gradient-based learning of Neural Networks remains an outstanding challenge, even for the simplest shallow architectures.
A powerful mathematical framework that has emerged over recent years lifts the optimization in the space of probability measures, and captures important empirical phenomena such as the ‘blessing of overparametrization’. However, the resulting learning guarantees remain mostly qualitative.
In this talk, we study the fluctuations between idealized mean-field dynamics and polynomially-sized networks over suitable time horizons — the so-called Propagation of Chaos. We provide a novel analysis that goes beyond traditional Gronwall-based PoC by exploiting certain geometric properties of the optimization landscape, and apply these results to representative models such as single-index models, establishing polynomial learning guarantees.
Joint work with Margalit Glasgow and Denny Wu.

ESE Fall Seminar - "Physics-Aware, Full-Stack Software to Accelerate Practical Quantum Computing"
2025-09-25 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Quantum software can be a force multiplier that can significantly shorten the timeline for utility-scale results from quantum hardware. In particular, several key research directions will help realize practical quantum advantage. Physics-aware, cross-layer optimizations will continue to yield important efficiencies to allow applications to make the most of quantum resources. Software-directed noise-aware optimization and error correction, in particular, will be key to increasing gate depths and maintaining acceptable output fidelity. Pulse-level optimizations and specialized native gates will also be key enablers. Additionally, applications will be hybrid computations involving high-performance classical resources as well as quantum hardware serving as special-purpose accelerators. Effectively partitioning computations between these classical and quantum resources will be necessary to support realistic applications. Additionally, deep compiler optimization and classical simulation of Clifford and near-Clifford circuits can also be important classical investments towards more efficient quantum computations.

MSE Seminar: Designing Biomaterials With Spatially Tunable Properties - Lesley Chow - Lehigh University
2025-09-25 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu & Chen Auditorium
Biological tissues are complex materials where the spatial arrangement of multiple components (i.e., extracellular matrix, cells) is tightly linked to their function. For example, osteochondral tissues contain discrete biochemical and physical gradients across the bone-cartilage interface that are critical for functional load transfer in our articulating joints. Our lab is focused on strategies to fabricate biomaterials with spatially tunable biochemical and physical properties to engineer tissues with native-like organization. To achieve this, we have developed a versatile approach using end-functionalized polymer conjugates that enable us to
independently control surface chemistry, scaffold architecture, and scaffold stiffness. Functional groups become displayed on the surface during fabrication, eliminating the need for post-processing modification steps. Multiple chemistries can therefore be spatially presented by using multiple printer heads during a single 3D printing session. In parallel, we can independently and simultaneously control scaffold architecture and stiffness by changing print patterns and polymer molecular weight ratios, respectively. This seminar will describe our platform and how we are developing 3D-printed materials to guide tissue regeneration for
complex tissues like the osteochondral interface.

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "The Role of YAP and TAZ in Regulating Load-induced Bone Adaptation and Osteocytes Mechanosensing"
2025-09-25 10:00 - 11:00 | Towne 305, 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Mechanical loading is essential for skeletal growth, maintenance, and repair, yet the mechanisms that regulate bone mechanoadaptation remain incompletely understood. Yes-associated protein (YAP) and transcriptional co-activator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ), downstream of the Hippo pathway, are emerging regulators of bone cell biology, but their in vivo role in skeletal mechanoadaptation has not been fully defined.
To address this, we combined pharmacological inhibition of YAP/TAZ with models of prenatal and postnatal C57BL/6 mice. We began with a short in vivo study to test the effectiveness of verteporfin (VP) in suppressing YAP/TAZ activity and to optimize dynamic histomorphometry and high-resolution osteocyte imaging. VP is a small-molecule inhibitor that interferes with YAP/TAZ–TEAD transcriptional activity. Next, we examined prenatal load-induced bone formation using an ex vivo bioreactor system, in which E15.5 embryonic hindlimbs were subjected to cyclic compression to induce ossification of the primary centers. Samples were also cultured in media containing VP to test whether YAP/TAZ inhibition suppresses load-induced prenatal bone formation.
Finally, we investigated adult mechanoadaptation using a cyclic compressive in vivo tibial loading model in C57BL/6 mice. Animals were injected with DMSO (vehicle), VP, or MGH-CP1 (CP1) and loaded over two weeks. CP1 is a TEAD autopalmitoylation inhibitor that suppresses YAP/TAZ–TEAD transcriptional activity.
Our results demonstrated that YAP/TAZ inhibition abrogated load-induced bone formation. Prenatally, rudiment mineral lengthening was suppressed. In adults, the anabolic effects of loading—increased periosteal and endosteal bone formation parameters, cortical thickness, and trabecular architecture were supprerssed when YAP/TAZ were inhibited. Mechanical loading increased the fraction of positively labeled osteocyte lacunae and enhanced osteocyte cytoskeletal branching, but these effects were abolished under VP or CP1 treatment. Finally, we confirmed the mechanosensitivity of bone marrow cells: loading upregulated Cyr61 and Ctgf, well-established YAP/TAZ target genes, but this response was suppressed by VP or CP1.
These findings establish YAP/TAZ as critical regulators of load-induced bone formation across developmental stages. By coordinating mechanosensitive responses among osteoblasts, osteoclasts, osteocytes, and marrow stromal cells, YAP/TAZ act as central regulators of skeletal mechanotransduction. This work not only provides mechanistic insight into the cellular basis of bone mechanoadaptation but also highlights YAP/TAZ as potential therapeutic targets in conditions of skeletal fragility, including osteoporosis and osteogenesis imperfecta.

CBE Seminar: "Imaging Genetics: Enhancer-mediated Dynamic Gene Control in Space and Time" (Bomyi Lim, University of Pennsylvania)
2025-09-24 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Canonical models suggest that regulatory enhancers function independently of genomic distance, position, and orientation to activate the target gene. Indeed, a wide range of genomic distances and relative enhancer positions exist in endogenous contexts. However, systematic analysis of how specific enhancer-promoter configurations affect transcriptional dynamics has been limited by technical constraints. Here, we employ single-cell MS2/MCP-based live imaging in Drosophila embryos to systematically analyze transcriptional dynamics driven by varying enhancer-promoter configurations. Our analyses reveal that while linear enhancer-promoter distance moderately tunes transcriptional output, downstream enhancer positioning relative to the promoter reduces mRNA output by 70%. Each configuration modulates distinct transcriptional parameters: linear distance governs initiation kinetics, while relative enhancer positioning dictates transcriptional stability. Although the downstream enhancer positioning destabilized the enhancer-promoter interactions, transcription factor hub properties remained comparable between two configurations, revealing a clear dissociation between TF hub dynamics and E-P configuration-dependent transcriptional activity. These effects are consistent across varied enhancer and reporter sequences, revealing configuration-dependent cis-regulatory element arrangement as an intrinsic mechanism for transcriptional fine-tuning. This work challenges the paradigm of configuration-independent enhancer function and establishes a framework to dissect the interplay between genome architecture and trans-acting factors.

Fall 2025 GRASP SFI: Deepti Ghadiyaram, Boston University, "Interpreting and Leveraging Generative Representations"
2025-09-24 15:00 - 16:00 | Levine 307, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance via Zoom.
ABSTRACT
Generating high-quality photo-realistic visual content is a thriving area of research. In this talk, I will focus not on the generation process, but on understanding how rich visual semantic information is represented within generative models. Specifically, I will present our work that uses mechanistic interpretability tools like k-sparse autoencoders to probe various layers and denoising timesteps of different diffusion architectures. Next, I will present how to leverage interpretable concepts to control the generation process towards more safer and creative outcomes.

ASSET Seminar: "How do LLMs generalize on out-of-distribution tasks? insights from model's internal representations"
2025-09-24 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
A mystery of large language models (LLMs) is their ability to solve novel tasks, notably through a few demonstrations in the prompt (in-context learning). Such tasks often require the model to generalize far beyond its training distribution, raising the question: how do LLMs achieve this form of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization? For example, in symbolized language reasoning where names/labels are replaced by arbitrary symbols, yet the model can infer the correct name-label mapping without any finetuning.
In this talk, I will open the black box of LLMs and reveal how three facets of LLM behavior are interconnected: emergent phenomena during training, OOD generalization, and a model’s representation of compositions. Focusing on induction heads, I will show that learning the right compositional structure is a key to OOD generalization, and this learning process exhibits sharp transitions in training dynamics. Further, I propose that “”common bridge representation hypothesis””—where a latent subspace in the embedding space acts as a bridge to align multiple attention heads across early and later layers—may be the key geometric structure underlying the success of transformers.

Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/91447341103

CBE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: "DROPS-ON-STILTS MICROROBOTS FOR TRANSPORT AND DELIVERY OF HYDROPHOBIC CARGO" (Oluwafemi Ligan)
2025-09-23 13:00 - 15:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Abstract:
Magnetically actuated microrobots composed of dynamic assemblies of iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) offer versatile opportunities for biomedical applications. While such assemblies can reconfigure and perform diverse tasks under applied magnetic fields, the effective transport of hydrophobic cargo remains a significant challenge. To address this limitation, we introduce “drops-on-stilts” microrobots formed by the co-assembly of IONPs with oil droplets, enabling magnetic field-guided locomotion and delivery of hydrophobic payloads, including therapeutic agents. Using a 3D Helmholtz coil to generate uniform rotating magnetic fields, we induce the assembly of IONPs and droplets into stilt-like architectures that lift and mobilize droplets across surfaces. The formation of these structures depends critically on particle wetting behavior, interfacial packing, and initial suspension conditions. At low IONP volume fractions, magnetic dipole interactions drive IONP accumulation at droplet poles, facilitating rotational motion. At higher concentrations, elongated IONP chains in suspension merge with interfacially -trapped particles to create stilts, enabling droplet walking with velocities that scale linearly with stilt length. High droplet number densities further promote chaining and merging into “log-like” collectives capable of rolling or walking. We demonstrate that drops-on-stilts and their collectives can navigate obstacles and transport both IONPs and oil as cargo. Monte Carlo simulations, modeling IONPs as hard spheres with magnetic dipolar interactions and adhesion to droplet interfaces, reproduce the experimentally observed chain formation and collective dynamics, validating the proposed mechanism. Modulation of magnetic field conditions and pH tunes nanoparticle adhesion to the oil interface, yielding distinct structural and dynamical behaviors. Finally, we apply this platform to the delivery of hydrophobic therapeutics against Candida albicans biofilms, highlighting its potential for biomedical treatment. Overall, this work establishes a tunable microrobotic strategy with enhanced adaptability to complex environments, offering a promising route for magnetically controlled transport and delivery of hydrophobic agents.
Zoom:
Meeting ID: 819 155 7123
Passcode: [REDACTED]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: "SLAM in Hard Places"
2025-09-23 12:00 - 13:00 | Eyebrow
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 controlled indoor and urban environments. Despite these advancements, as roboticists endeavour to deploy agents in more unstructured outdoor settings to perform search and rescue or geological survey, the standard assumptions adopted by the majority of the community start to break down. In this talk we will discuss the SLAM paradigm at a high level, how these assumptions break down in the outdoor-unstructured setting and existing strategies for mitigation. We will present work evaluating state of the art SLAM algorithms in the geology context, develop SLAM in an underwater ocean setting under extreme sensing constraints, and extend this framework for active SLAM in this context.

ESE Fall Seminar - "Architectures, Topologies and Control for High-Frequency Power Electronics"
2025-09-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Power converters designed for higher frequency operation than conventional designs can be smaller and lighter. However, to gain these benefits and maintain high reliability the converters also need to be more efficient, as smaller converters offer less surface area for heat removal. The development of efficient, small and light weight power converters can benefit from converter architectures that leverage novel topologies and control techniques. Using examples from my group’s research on compact and high-efficiency power converters, this talk will highlight the opportunities and challenges at the frontiers of high-frequency power electronics. One focus of the talk will be on new power electronic converter architectures that target high power densities and high efficiencies for wide operating range applications. Another focus of the talk will be on emerging power electronic enabled applications, including wireless power transfer systems suitable for powering in-motion mobile platforms and radio-frequency power amplifiers for compact particle accelerators. The talk will also identify directions for future work in the area of high performance power electronic converters.

MEAM Seminar: "Nature in Motion: Unraveling Locomotion across Mediums and Scales"
2025-09-23 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Biology and Engineering form an interdisciplinary two-way street. On the one side, natural solutions can inform and inspire the design of mechanical systems. This is referred to as bioinspired design. On the other side, referred to as engineering-enabled biology, controlled engineering experimental, numerical, and analytical tools are used and developed to answer fundamental biological questions that would be difficult or even impossible to answer directly using natural systems. This talk will introduce several examples of bioinspired multifunctional structures, such as feather-inspired flow control devices. Flow control devices on birds’ wings offer a pathway to advance the design of small aerial vehicles and inform flight control for airborne energy harvesters. In addition to bioinspired engineering, I will highlight a few examples of engineering-enabled biology, such as revealing the physics governing the aerial-aquatic transition of flying fish and the mechanism that enables click beetles’ legless jumping. These research topics demonstrate how nature can inform new locomotion, actuation, and control strategies in mechanical systems, highlighting that engineering analysis can provide valuable insights into nature’s locomotion and adaptation strategies.

PICS Colloquium: Enabling computationally efficient first-principles kinetic simulations in nanoporous catalysts using machine learning and data science with Brandon Bukowski
2025-09-19 14:00 - 15:00 | PICS Conference Room 534 – A Wing , 5th Floor, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Machine learning tools have tremendous potential to accelerate computationally complex physics-based simulations. One example is the need to accelerate materials discovery through first-principles Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations.
This seminar will encompass how machine learning interatomic potentials accelerate the discovery of crystalline nanoporous solids such as zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that are employed in a wide range of catalytic processes due in part to their tunable micro-environments. Kinetics at intracrystalline sites can be modified by changing pore size, pore architecture, or polarity. These environments impart shape-selectivity that preferentially stabilizes transition states, but the large design space including pore architecture, polarity, and catalytic active site identity preclude comprehensive kinetic studies. DFT describes the electronic states of reactive intermediates and transition states but cannot access the longer length scales necessary to quantify the fluxionality of coadsorbed species or solvents. Classical simulations can accurately simulate these conformational changes but require parameterized values. Machine learning interatomic potentials have emerged as a technique to derive parameterized models from DFT data, and our aim is to adapt these models to predict the entropy and diffusion of reactive intermediates in nanoporous catalysts.

[VIRTUAL SPEAKER]: Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Max Welling, University of Amsterdam & CuspAI, "On the Role of Uncertainty in Automating the Scientific Process with AI"
2025-09-19 10:30 - 11:45 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
This event will have a VIRTUAL SPEAKER. Streaming will be in-person only in Wu and Chen.
ABSTRACT
We are in the middle of a transformation of the scientific process. AI is now rapidly automating scientific discovery by accelerating scientific simulation and optimisation. For example, we can now shortcut expensive quantum mechanical calculations such as DFT with much faster machine learned interatomic potentials and forces, numerically “solve” PDEs with neural networks, or accelerate experimental design with Bayesian optimisation. However, in both applications of AI the role of uncertainty is key because ML models can only be trusted in regions of input space where it has seen data. Extrapolating too far away from the data runs the risk of a large prediction error that goes unnoticed. In this talk I will first provide a high level overview of the increasingly important role of AI in science, and then proceed with introducing a new efficient Variational Bayesian method for uncertainty quantification. I will show the effectiveness of this method on PDE solving and molecular generation (BARNN) and on ML interatomic potentials and forces (BLIP).

AI Research Mixer 2025
2025-09-19 08:00 - 17:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Auditorium, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Event Date: Friday, September 19, 2025
Time: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Event Location: Amy Gutmann Hall Auditorium

Hosted by:
ASSET Center for Trustworthy AI
IDEAS Innovation in Data Engineering and Science
The Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences
DDDI Data Driven Discovery Initiative
Penn AI

Event Description:
Please join us for a full day of faculty talks, poster presentations, and networking opportunities with members of ASSET, IDEAS, Warren, DDDI and Penn AI to learn about the wide range of AI research happening here at Penn.
All Penn community members who have interest in AI are welcome!

Catering will be provided throughout the day, including a light reception following the final talks.

Click here for the event schedule.

FOLDS seminar: Heaviside Composite Optimization: A new paradigm of optimization
2025-09-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Zoom link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98220304722

A Heaviside function is an indicator function of a semi-infinite interval. A Heaviside composite function is a Heaviside function composed with a multivariate function that may be nonsnooth. This talk presents a touch of this novel class of discontinuous optimization problems that borders on continuous and discrete optimization. Among the rich applications of such problems, we mention one pertaining to classification and treatment with constraints solvable by an elementary yet novel progressive integer programming (PIP) method that can be applied broadly to many other problems,​ including indefinite quadratic programs and linear programs with linear​ complementarity constraints. Computational results demonstrate the excellent​ performance of the PIP idea and its superiority over a full integer programming approach.

MSE Seminar: 1D Topological Systems for Next-Generation Electronics - Judy J. Cha - Cornell University
2025-09-18 10:30 - 12:00 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Topological nanowires, topological materials confined in one dimension (1D), hold great promise for robust and scalable quantum computing and low-dissipation interconnect applications, which will transform current computing technologies. To do so, research in topological nanowires must continue to improve their synthesis and properties.
In this talk, I will discuss my group’s efforts to develop a high throughput and precision synthesis method to fabricate 1D topological systems. We employ recently developed thermomechanical nanomolding to extrude single crystal nanowires of topological materials with controlled diameter. I will highlight our transport studies on topological semimetal nanowires for their potential application as extremely scaled, low-resistance interconnects. We demonstrate that the resistivity scaling of topological semimetal nanowires is superior to those of the state-of-the-art Cu interconnects and Cu alternative metals, presenting them as viable candidates for the low-resistance interconnect applications.

CBE Seminar: "Natural Product Research for Human Health and Biocatalysis" (Wenjun Zhang, UC Berkeley)
2025-09-17 15:30 - 16:30 | Wu & Chen Auditorium
Abstract:
Natural products are historically great sources of human medicines, but their impacts are well beyond their use as drugs. In addition to well-known producers like environmental microbes and plants, the human microbiome is an emerging source of new natural products that often correlate with health or disease. There is an urgent need for the experimental characterization of these abundant, yet poorly understood, molecules and the downstream socio-chemical relationships they mediate. In the first half of my lecture, I will introduce efforts from my group on the discovery and functional study of new bioactive natural products, particularly from the human oral microbiome. In the second half, I will discuss our work on understanding natural product biosynthesis, which makes it possible to produce more bioactive natural products and their analogs via synthetic biology and yield useful enzymes for biocatalysis. Our recent efforts on discovering and characterizing N-N bond-forming enzymes will be highlighted.

ASSET Seminar: "Symbolic Reasoning in the Age of Large Language Models"
2025-09-17 12:00 - 13:15 | Amy Gutmann Hall, Room 414, 3333 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, United States
Today, reasoning is commonly interpreted as large language models generating chains of thought. Yet historically, AI reasoning had a very different meaning: executing algorithms that manipulated symbols to perform logical or probabilistic deduction and derive definite answers to questions about knowledge. In this talk, I show that such old-fashioned ideas are very relevant to reasoning with large language models today. In particular, I will demonstrate that integrating symbolic reasoning algorithms directly into the architecture of language models enables state-of-the-art capabilities in controllable text generation, alignment, and mathematical reasoning. These capabilities are built on top of tractable probabilistic circuit models that approximate the distribution of the large language model’s future behavior, and allow for efficient reasoning on the GPU. I will further show that the same ideas naturally extend to neurosymbolic offline reinforcement learning and image diffusion.

Seminar Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PF5GxivBHKiloFdKTv59NMae5dtXDzSk/view?usp=sharing

MEAM Seminar: "Micro-surgical Tools for Dissecting Cells and Tissues"
2025-09-16 10:15 - 11:15 | Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Wound healing is an essential biological process for maintaining homeostasis and, ultimately, for survival. We investigate the mechanisms underlying extreme wound healing in Stentor coeruleus, a single-celled organism, capable of recovering from drastic membrane wounds exceeding half of the cell surface. This talk focuses on our recent effort on developing a microfluidic platform for the manipulation and reproducible wounding of the cell. We demonstrate a microfluidic “guillotine” for bisecting cells in a continuous flow, and a “SMORES” platform to immobilize the cells for laser ablation. We further discuss the extension of the tool for dissecting live tumors to generate organoids that preserve the tumor immune microenvironment for applications including the testing of immunotherapy on a chip.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Georgios Mentzelopoulos
2025-09-15 12:30 - 14:30 | PA
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Flavia Vitale are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Georgios Mentzelopoulos.
Title: From thoughts to actions: cracking the neural code across scales and modalities
Advisor: Dr. Flavia Vitale
Date: Monday, September 15th
Time: 12:30 PM- 2:30 PM
Location: 225 Towne Building
The public is welcome to attend.

BE Doctoral Dissertation Defense: Brian-Tinh D. Vu
2025-09-13 10:00 - 11:00 | PA
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Chamith Rajapakse are pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Brian-Tinh D. Vu.
Title: “Rapid, High-resolution, and Signal-efficient Methods for the Clinical Translation of Bone Magnetic Resonance Imaging”
Date: Wednesday, September 17th
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: BRB 1412
Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/99746435550?pwd=[REDACTED]
The public is welcome to attend.
