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.
Cosette 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.
