Category: interview

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Scaling Student Innovation: Enginuity Powers Community-Driven Engineering

At the University of Pennsylvania, student-led projects through Penn ADAPT (Assistive Devices and Prosthetic Technologies) have demonstrated how engineering can move beyond the classroom to address real-world challenges, from assistive devices to clinical tools. But as those efforts grew, so did a fundamental constraint: connecting students with the communities and organizations who needed their skills.

Brianna Leung, a graduating M.S.E. student in Bioengineering and former president of Penn ADAPT, saw that gap firsthand. While student teams were eager to build and community needs were abundant, sourcing projects often required months of outreach, coordination and persistence. Through her work with community partners, including ongoing engagement with HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy, a Philadelphia-based school serving students with complex disabilities, Leung saw both the demand for assistive solutions and the barriers to accessing them.

In response, she helped develop Enginuity, a platform that allows community partners to post engineering challenges directly, connecting them with student teams more efficiently to address real-world needs.

Now, as Leung prepares to graduate, leadership of Enginuity will transition to Andrew Yao, a second-year in Bioengineering and vice president of Penn ADAPT. Yao will continue expanding the platform’s reach and impact. Together, their perspectives highlight both the platform’s origins and its next phase.

Brianna Leung (BE’26), Former President of Penn ADAPT

Q: During your involvement with Penn ADAPT what gaps did you start to notice in how projects were sourced or developed, and how did that lead to Enginuity?

The goal with ADAPT was always to use engineering as a force for change in Philadelphia. I’ve always preferred working on projects with a real-world end goal. When we have a student body that is skilled, well-resourced and eager to build, it doesn’t make sense to focus only on hypothetical problems.

We started reaching out to community partners, beginning with cold emails and early pilot projects. Over time, the number of potential projects began to outpace our capacity. That’s when we started thinking about how to make this kind of work more accessible. Enginuity grew out of that idea, as a way to build a more direct and scalable connection between student engineers and community needs.

Q: Enginuity allows organizations to post their own engineering challenges. What changes when the community defines the problems?

A huge part of engineering is listening and understanding a problem. The community knows best what it needs.

When organizations define their own challenges, students gain a much richer experience. You’re not just solving a predefined problem—you’re translating real-world constraints, user needs and qualitative feedback into something tangible. That process builds both technical skills and empathy.

Q: What are the biggest barriers today for students who want to engage in real-world engineering problem-solving, and how does Enginuity address them?

At Penn, everyone is incredibly busy. From my own experience, it took a full summer of emails, meetings and coordination to establish our first collaboration. Building those relationships can take years, and most students don’t have the time to navigate that process.

Enginuity simplifies that by creating a centralized space where community members can submit project ideas. Instead of starting from scratch, students can focus on the work itself, connecting more quickly and collaborating more effectively.

Q: Many student projects are tied to a semester or a single team. Why was it important to build a platform instead of focusing on individual projects?

We’re hoping to generate more projects overall. Through ADAPT, we saw that there was a lot of need, but not enough people available to handle the outreach and logistics.

By building a platform, we can remove some of those barriers and allow more students to get involved. The goal is to make it easier for engineers to focus on solving problems rather than finding them.

Q: How do you see Enginuity changing the relationship between Penn and the Philadelphia community?

Penn is an incredibly well-resourced institution, and ADAPT has benefited from support across labs, departments and staff. There’s a real opportunity to use those resources to make a meaningful impact in Philadelphia.

At the same time, Philadelphia has the highest per-capita disability rate of any major U.S. city. As engineers, we have a responsibility to contribute where we can. I hope Enginuity helps build a more consistent and dependable connection, so community members feel they can turn to us for support.

Q: If Enginuity succeeds at the scale you envision, what could it change about how engineering solutions are developed and shared?

Student engineers occupy a unique space, especially in areas like assistive technology. Many devices for specialized needs are either unavailable or extremely expensive.

Every week, through my work with HMS School, I see devices that cost hundreds of dollars but could be built for a fraction of that. That gap highlights both the challenge and the opportunity. I hope Enginuity can mobilize a broader network of student engineers to help fill those gaps and expand access to these kinds of solutions.

Q: How has building Enginuity shaped the way you think about engineering and your role as a bioengineering student?

Building Enginuity has been an exploration of how projects generate learning. In traditional coursework, there are clearly defined skills and relatively low stakes. However, with Enginuity, real-world problems can be solved in many different ways, and students may develop completely different technical skills working on the same challenge. At the same time, the stakes are higher. Delivering a solution in a real-world setting and maintaining relationships with our partners requires follow-through, and that can be difficult to guarantee. These questions, how to structure projects, how to support students and how to ensure meaningful outcomes, have shaped how I think about engineering as both a technical and systems-level discipline.

Developing the platform also required thinking about accessibility from the start. We worked to ensure the site is usable for individuals with disabilities, incorporating features such as screen-reader compatibility, adjustable text and clear navigation. In that sense, Enginuity is not only a tool for engineering projects, but an engineering project itself.

As Enginuity continues to grow, its long-term impact will depend on sustained student leadership. With Leung graduating, that responsibility will shift to Andrew Yao (BE’28), vice president of Penn ADAPT, who has been involved in the organization’s projects and outreach.

Yao sees Enginuity not only as a way to expand access to engineering projects, but also as an opportunity to strengthen connections between students and the communities they aim to serve.

Andrew Yao (BE’28), Vice President of Penn ADAPT

Q: What excites you about taking over leadership of Enginuity?

I’m excited to continue working with community partners and expand ADAPT’s outreach. We recently showcased Enginuity at the Philly Maker Faire and received a lot of positive feedback, which showed there’s a real need for this kind of platform.

I’m looking forward to building on what Brianna started, connecting organizations and individuals with student problem-solvers to create a greater impact in the Philadelphia community.

Q: How does Enginuity shape the way students approach engineering problems?

It helps keep the focus on the end user. As engineers, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical side and lose sight of whether a solution is actually practical.

On one of my projects, we initially designed a robotic system to assist surgeons, but after speaking with clinicians, we learned it wouldn’t be feasible in practice. That kind of feedback is critical, and Enginuity encourages more of those conversations early in the process.

Q: Where can community partners go to submit a project, and what information do they need?

Community partners can submit projects through the Enginuity page on the Penn ADAPT website or contact us directly by email (pennadapt@gmail.com). We ask for a description of the problem, and while additional materials like images or videos are helpful, they’re not required.

We’ve designed the platform to be accessible and easy to use, so partners don’t need a technical background to participate.

As Enginuity expands, it reflects a broader shift in how engineering education and practice intersect, not only building solutions, but building the pathways that make those solutions possible.

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Dialogue Across Differences: A Q&A with Roy H. Hamilton, MD

by Meredith Mann

Roy H. Hamilton, MD, MS

A multiracial Black and Asian self-described secular humanist, who was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and is now in an interracial, interfaith marriage, walked into a Passover seder.  

It’s not the setup for a groaner of a joke, or an epic fail of an evening. Rather, as Roy H. Hamilton, MD, tells it, this was his experience this spring as his Jewish in-laws—the family he has loved as his own for over two decades—came together to commemorate the universal human themes of freedom and deliverance from oppression reflected in the Passover narrative. Though he does this every year, this year he had some trepidation. In a time marked by tragic conflict and with tensions both abroad and at home, it seemed like having a frank discussion of these themes might invite acrimony. But what emerged instead was a profound opportunity to listen, to appreciate each other’s perspective, and to “exercise empathy for trauma that’s happening to everyone.” 

It was a bit of a revelation for Hamilton, Penn Medicine’s new vice dean for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. “In the moment that you would have thought would be the worst to open up certain topics, we all ended up having a great dialogue across differences,” he said. Why? “Because we all felt connected enough to give each other respect, compassion, and grace, even when our thoughts and opinions differed.  It made me think about how we can further cultivate a culture of empathy at Penn too.” 

Today, as Hamilton begins his third decade on the faculty at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, he is devoted to making academia a safe, supportive space for students and colleagues alike. He serves as a professor of Neurology, with secondary appointments in Psychiatry and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Hamilton is also director of both the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation; and the Penn Brain Science, Translation and Modulation (BrainSTIM) Center. Previously, he was the Perelman School of Medicine’s assistant dean for Cultural Affairs and Diversity for almost a decade, and launched similar efforts in his field, serving as Penn Neurology’s vice chair for Diversity and Inclusion from 2017 until his recent elevation to the role for Penn Medicine as a whole. 

Given his own diverse background and personal life, Hamilton wants everyone—trainees, faculty, patients—to feel valued and included. “I touch enough spaces in my personal life that when groups are being clearly systematically disadvantaged, it often feels like it’s touching on some piece of my own identity,” he said, in discussing his background and hope for his new leadership position. “I bring a lot of myself to this role.” 

In a recent discussion, Hamilton shared perspectives on why supporting inclusion, diversity, and equity matters—particularly for an institution training future doctors—and what Penn Medicine is doing in this sphere. 

Read the full interview in Penn Medicine News.

Roy H. Hamilton, M.D., M.S. is a Professor in the departments of Neurology, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine and a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group. He is Director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation (LCNS).

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Empowering Future Engineers: Lyle Brunhofer and the Impact of Senior Design

by Ian Scheffler

“Senior Design was such an incredible part of my senior year and Penn Engineering experience that when I joined the Board of the Engineering Alumni Society, I knew immediately that I would focus on helping the event continue,” says Lyle Brunhofer (EAS’14, GEng’14).

Today, Lyle Brunhofer (EAS’14, GEng’14) advises companies on digital transformations, applying the skills he learned at Penn Engineering to modernize firms’ understanding of customers in industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals and consumer products.

He also helps run Penn Engineering’s annual Senior Design Project Competition, which recruits dozens of alumni to evaluate seniors’ year-long capstone projects. As the Vice President and Senior Design Chair of the Engineering Alumni Society, Brunhofer works hand-in-hand with Bradley Richards (C’92, LPS’17), Director of Alumni Relations, to coordinate the year-long competition and multi-day concluding extravaganza — part Shark Tank, part science competition — in May.

While at Penn Engineering, Brunhofer’s own Senior Design team developed assistive technology to help those with physical disabilities interact with their environment using modular, 3D printed switches. Assist3D partnered with the HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy, located in West Philadelphia, to ensure that products met users’ needs. “We set out to create ability switches that would be affordable, customizable and simple, in contrast to the ability switches available on the market,” Brunhofer recalls. After graduation, the team provided the finished products to the HMS School.

As Brunhofer sees it, Senior Design instills skills far beyond the scope of typical engineering courses. “As a student, I felt that Senior Design was an extremely challenging, but rewarding experience,” he says. “It was also unlike any assignment we had been given previously.”

In a Q&A with Penn Engineering Today, Brunhofer discussed what motivates him to stay involved with Penn Engineering as an alumnus and the impact of participating in Senior Design.

How did you get involved as an alumni volunteer with Senior Design?

Senior Design was such an incredible part of my senior year and Penn Engineering experience that when I joined the Board of the Engineering Alumni Society, I knew immediately that I would focus on helping the event continue.

What do you feel makes Senior Design unique?

The mentorship. Students get to work with industry experts, faculty members, alumni and other professionals who help students hone their technical and soft skills, and foster networking opportunities for future careers.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Lyle Brunhofer is Business Integration Manager at Accenture. He graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014.

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Unlocking Nature’s Secrets: Sherry Gao Pushes the Boundaries of Genetic Engineering

by Ian Scheffler

Sherry (Xue) Gao, Presidental Penn Compact Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and in Bioengineering

Sherry (Xue) Gao, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), always knew she had a future in the lab. “I grew up in China, and when I was little, maybe six or seven,” she recalls, “my teacher asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I said, ‘I want to be a scientist!’”

Neither of her parents had studied beyond high school; when Gao finished her training as a chemical engineer, she became the first person in her family to graduate from college. “One of my greatest motivations is to help first-generation college students,” Gao says.

Now, as the newest faculty member in CBE, Gao is prepared to do just that: support the next generation of chemical engineers, while also conducting groundbreaking research in the development of small molecules to edit genes, pushing the boundaries of precision medicine.

The Presidential Penn Compact Professorships were created by former Penn President Amy Gutmann specifically to recruit and support faculty like Gao: transformative leaders working at the intersection of multiple fields with “a yen for collaboration,” as Gutmann told the Penn Gazette in 2021.

Gao joins Penn Engineering from Rice University, where she collected numerous accolades, including the 2024 BMES-CMBE Rising Star Award, a 2022 NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 Outstanding Young Faculty at Rice School of Engineering Award and the 2020 NIH MIRA R35 Award.

As a member of the Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H), Gao will partner with colleagues from across the School to develop technologies that bridge disciplines, all in the interest of advancing health care. “We are very excited to have Sherry as a new member of the Center,” says Daniel Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor and inaugural Director of CPE4H. “Gene editing is an important new tool that can precisely alter cell behavior by deleting or redirecting cell pathways, as well as enhancing and suppressing gene expression. She will have significant interactions with other members of the Center, such as Mike Mitchell and myself, as well as the broader Penn community, especially with the CAR therapists.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Since this story was originally published in March 2024, Sherry Gao now holds a secondary appointment in Bioengineering, effective July 1, 2024.

Daniel Hammer and Michael Mitchell both hold primary appointments in Bioengineering.

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Vijay Balasubramanian’s Academic Journey Explored

by Kristina García

Younger scientists often ask him about exploring multiple fields, Balasubramanian says. The advice he offers is to “have a central line where you have credibility, where you’ve established that you’re really, really good at what you do, and you can be trusted.” (Image: Eric Sucar)

Academia is a long journey of specialization and behind any professor’s CV are long hours of research and study. While the path can be direct for some, for others there’s a pivot, a moment or experience that changes the course of that journey.

Penn Today spoke with four professors whose academic paths diverged, to learn about the trajectory of their interdisciplinary work. Vijay Balasubramanian traverses the boundaries of physics and neuroscience. Tukufu Zuberi is a demographer-turned-curator. Brittany Watson integrates education, research, and veterinary medicine. Amy Hillier began her career studying historical mortgage redlining and moved into supporting trans youth.

Vijay Balasubramanian
The Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics in the School of Arts & Sciences

Wandering through Kolkata’s markets in India stimulates the mind. Hawkers’ cries pass through the inner ear as electrical signals; the pungent, earthy smell of turmeric enters the brain through olfactory sensory neurons. In 1976, a 7-year-old Vijay Balasubramanian had his own market revelation through a bookseller’s portico, where the cover of a slim volume showed a man peering through a microscope lens and a smattering of white paint scattered like stars across the firmament of man and machine.

“What is a scientist?” the book asked, running through a series of exciting adventure shots: archeologic discovery, venom extraction, missile control. In that moment, Balasubramanian knew he would be a scientist. It looked, he says, “amazingly cool.”

When he arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Balasubramanian wanted to study the fundamental laws of nature. “So that’s physics,” he says. While earning his doctoral degree at Princeton University, a mentor suggested Balasubramanian read papers in the burgeoning field of neuroscience. It immediately resonated. “Oh my god, this stuff is so cool,” Balasubramanian thought. “But the final year of a Ph.D. is not the time to switch.”

He earned his degree and took a position as a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. During the day, he worked on string theory and the information loss paradox for black holes. But in the evening, he would moonlight in a neuroscience lab.

As a young theoretical physicist at Penn, Balasubramanian met Peter Sterling. A former Freedom Rider and professor of neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine, Sterling was “a true intellectual,” Balasubramanian says. He knew everything, was interested in everything, and would talk with anybody.

The pair wrote a series of papers together regarding information processing and transmission. “He’s so quick and so much fun and so lively,” Sterling says of Balasubramanian. “He’s fearless; there’s nothing he won’t try.”

While in Cairo with wife Heather J. Sharkey, professor of modern Middle Eastern and North African history at Penn, Balasubramanian prepared a neuroscience grant and submitted it to the National Science Foundation, “sort of on a whim,” he says. “I put it in from an internet café on an island in the middle of the Nile.” He got the grant and started a research group.

After that, Balasubramanian says, “I was off and running.”

“I was certainly told,” Balasubramanian says of his work in neuroscience, “do not do this before tenure.” But, if he waited, “then I’d be too set my ways,” he says. “I just wouldn’t know enough; it would be too hard to learn; I wouldn’t have the time.”

Younger scientists often ask him about exploring multiple fields, Balasubramanian says. The advice he offers is to “have a central line where you have credibility, where you’ve established that you’re really, really good at what you do, and you can be trusted.” That gives you more latitude, he says.

After that, it’s just sheer discipline. “You’re going to have to wake up earlier than everybody else. You’re going to have to work longer days,” he says. “Otherwise, you know, everybody else is working hard too, and you’ll never be able to achieve the level of expertise and knowledge to be able to do things at that world-class level.”

Balasubramanian wants to see more interdisciplinary collaboration. “Each field trains its students with a certain body of techniques that has been found historically useful in that field,’ he says. “Very often, those techniques also have uses elsewhere, but they don’t know to apply it.”

Traversing borders can be helpful in producing new insights, Balasubramanian says. You can ask questions that people in the field won’t. You might experiment with new ideas or put two disjointed ideas together, he says. “If you’re coming from outside, you have the leeway to do all kinds of silly things. Sometimes, they’re not silly.”

Why not ask new questions and propose new answers? In the end, the data will tell you what’s true. “It gives me comfort to know how things tick.”

This post is adapted from a longer story in Penn Today. Read the full story here.

Balasubramanian is Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group. Read more stories featuring his research here.

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Little Bots That Could Put a Stop to Infectious Disease

Image: Courtesy of iStock / K_E_N

Biofilms—structured communities of microorganisms that create a protective matrix shielding them from external threats, including antibiotics—are responsible for about 80% of human infections and present a significant challenge in medical treatments, often resisting conventional methods.

In a Q&A with Penn Today, Hyun (Michel) Koo of the School of Dental Medicine and Edward Steager of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn discuss an innovative approach they’ve partnered on: the use of small-scale robotics, microrobots, to offer a promising solution to tackle these persistent infections, bringing new capabilities and precision to the field of biomedical engineering.

Q: What is the motivation behind opting for tiny robots to tackle infections?

Koo: Treating biofilms is a broad yet unresolved biomedical problem, and conversely, the strategies for tackling biofilms are limited for a number of reasons. For instance, biofilms typically occur on surfaces that can be tricky to reach, like between the teeth in the oral cavity, the respiratory tract, or even within catheters and implants, so treatments for these are usually restricted to antibiotics (or antimicrobials) and other physical methods reliant on mechanical disruption. However, this touches on the problem of antimicrobial resistance: targeting specific microorganisms present in these structures is difficult, so antibiotics often fail to reach and penetrate the biofilm’s protective layers, leading to persistent infections and increased risk of antibiotic resistance.

We needed a way to circumvent these constraints, so Ed and I teamed up in 2017 to develop new, more precise and effective approaches that leverage the engineers’ ability to generate solutions that we, the clinicians and life science researchers, identify.

Read the full interview in Penn Today.

Hyun (Michel) Koo is a professor in the Department of Orthodontics and in the divisions of Pediatric Dentistry and Community Oral Health and the co-founder of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry in the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

Edward Steager is a senior research investigator in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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Innovation and Impact: “RNA: Past, Present and Future”

by Melissa Pappas

(Left to right): Mike Mitchell, Noor Momin, and David Meaney recording the Innovation & Impact podcast.

In the most recent episode of the Penn Engineering podcast Innovation & Impact, titled “RNA: Past, Present and Future,” David F. Meaney, Senior Associate Dean of Penn Engineering and Solomon R. Pollack Professor in Bioengineering, is joined by Mike Mitchell, Associate Professor in Bioengineering, and Noor Momin, who will be joining Penn Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering early next year, to discuss the impact that RNA has had on health care and biomedical engineering technologies.

Mitchell outlines his lab’s research that spans drug delivery, new technology in protecting RNA and its applications in treating cancer. Momin details her research, which is focused on optimizing the immune system to protect against illnesses such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. With Meaney driving the discussion around larger questions, including the possibility of a cancer vaccine, the three discuss what they are excited about now and where the field is going in the future with these emerging, targeted treatments.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Subscribe to the Innovation & Impact podcast on Apple Music, Spotify or your favorite listening platforms or find all the episodes on the Penn Engineering YouTube channel.

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Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Real Biological Advances—Meet César de la Fuente

by Eric Horvath

In an era peppered by breathless discussions about artificial intelligence—pro and con—it makes sense to feel uncertain, or at least want to slow down and get a better grasp of where this is all headed. Trusting machines to do things typically reserved for humans is a little fantastical, historically reserved for science fiction rather than science. 

Not so much for César de la Fuente, PhD, the Presidential Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, Microbiology, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Bioengineering in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science. Driven by his transdisciplinary background, de la Fuente leads the Machine Biology Group at Penn: aimed at harnessing machines to drive biological and medical advances. 

A newly minted National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine (ELHM) Scholar, among earning a host of other awards and honors (over 60), de la Fuente can sound almost diplomatic when describing the intersection of humanity, machines and medicine where he has made his way—ensuring multiple functions work together in harmony. 

“Biology is complexity, right? You need chemistry, you need mathematics, physics and computer science, and principles and concepts from all these different areas, to try to begin to understand the complexity of biology,” he said. “That’s how I became a scientist.”

Read the full story in Penn Medicine News.

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Carl June on the Boundless Potential of CAR T Cell Therapy

by Meagan Raeke

Carl June, at the flash mob celebration of the FDA approval of the CAR T cell therapy he developed, in August 2017. (Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine Magazine)

For most of modern medicine, cancer drugs have been developed the same way: by designing molecules to treat diseased cells. With the advent of immunotherapy, that changed. For the first time, scientists engineered patients’ own immune systems to recognize and attack diseased cells.

One of the best examples of this pioneering type of medicine is CAR T cell therapy. Invented in the Perelman School of Medicine by Carl June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy, CAR T cell therapy works by collecting T cells from a patient, modifying those cells in the lab so that they are designed to destroy cancerous cells, and reinfusing them into the patient. June’s research led to the first FDA approval for this type of therapy, in 2017. Six different CAR T cell therapies are now approved to treat various types of blood cancers. Carl June, at the flash mob celebration of the FDA approval of the CAR T cell therapy he developed, in August 2017. (Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine Magazine)

CAR T cell therapy holds the potential to help millions more patients—if it can be successfully translated to other conditions. June and colleagues, including Daniel Baker, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Cell and Molecular Biology department, discuss this potential in a perspective published in Nature.

In the piece, June and Baker highlight other diseases that CAR T cell therapy could be effective.

“CAR T cell therapy has been remarkably successful for blood cancers like leukemias and lymphomas. There’s a lot of work happening here at Penn and elsewhere to push it to other blood cancers and to earlier stage disease, so patients don’t have to go through chemo first,” June says. “Another big priority is patients with solid tumors because they make up the vast majority of cancer patients. Beyond cancer, we’re seeing early signs that CAR T cell therapy could work in autoimmune diseases, like lupus.”

As for which diseases to pursue as for possible future treatment, June says, “essentially it boils down to two questions: Can we identify a population of cells that are bad? And can we target them specifically? Whether that’s asthma or chronic diseases or lupus, if you can find a bad population of cells and get rid of them, then CAR T cells could be therapeutic in that context.”

“What’s exciting is it’s not just theoretical at this point. There have been clinical reports in other autoimmune diseases, including myasthenia gravis and inflammatory myopathy,” Baker says. “But we are seeing early evidence that CAR T cell therapy will be successful beyond cancer. And it’s really opening the minds of people in the field to think about how else we could use CAR T. For example, there’s some pioneering work at Penn from the Epstein lab for heart failure. The idea is that you could use CAR T cells to get rid of fibrotic tissue after a cardiac injury, and potentially restore the damage following a heart attack.”

Baker adds, “there’s no question that over the last decade, CAR T cell therapy has revolutionized cancer. I’m hoping to play a role in bringing these next generation therapies to patients and make a real impact over the next decade. I think there’s potential for cell therapy to be a new pillar of medicine at large, and not just a new pillar of oncology.”

Read the full story at Penn Medicine Today.

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Student Spotlight: Cosette Tomita

Cosette TomitaCosette Tomita, a master’s student in Bioengineering, spoke with Penn Engineering Graduate Admissions about her research in cellular therapy and her path to Penn Engineering.

“What were you doing before you came to Penn Engineering? 

After college I wanted to get some industry experience before going to graduate school, so I spent a year working for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. I learned a lot—but mostly I learned that I wanted to go back into academia. So I was looking for a more research-oriented position to boost my graduate school applications, and I found a position at Penn’s cyclotron facility. Shortly after that, I applied to the master’s program. I’m still working at the cyclotron, so I’m doing the program part time. 

How has your experience in the program been so far? 

I love the research I’m doing here. I love the collaboration we have and the fact that I’m able to work with whoever I want to. And I can only say good things about my PI, Robert Mach. He’s a very busy man, but he makes time for his people. And he recognizes when somebody has a lot on their plate and he will go to bat for that person.

What’s your research all about? 

The focus of my PI’s lab is on neurodegenerative diseases and opiate use, so we’re looking to make imaging agents and antagonists that can help with the opioid crisis. 

For my project, I wanted to look at treating neurodegenerative disease from the perspective of cellular therapy. My PI doesn’t have that expertise, so when I came to him with this idea, he said I should talk to Mark Sellmyer in the bioengineering department. He does a lot of cellular therapies, cell engineering, protein engineering and things of that nature. So his lab is more biological. 

I don’t have a grant for my research, so my advisors are supporting it out of their own pockets. They could have said, no, you need to work on this project that’s already going on in the lab. But they gave me the intellectual freedom to do what I wanted to do.”

Read the full Q&A at the Penn Engineering Graduate Admissions website.

Mark Sellmeyer is Assistant Professor of Radiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.