Penn Engineering – Penn Bioengineering Blog

The NSF AIRFoundry will accelerate RNA research using the power of AI and educate the next generation of RNA researchers. (DesignCells via Getty Images)

In a typical foundry, raw materials like steel and copper are melted down and poured into molds to assume new shapes and functions. The U.S. National Science Foundation Artificial Intelligence-driven RNA Foundry (NSF AIRFoundry), led by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Puerto Rico and supported by an $18-million, six-year grant, will serve much the same purpose, only instead of smithing metal, the “BioFoundry” will create molecules and nanoparticles.

NSF AIRFoundry is one of five newly created BioFoundries, each of which will have a different focus. Bringing together researchers from Penn Engineering, Penn Medicine’s Institute for RNA Innovation, the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPR-M), Drexel University, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and InfiniFluidics, the facility, which will be physically located in West Philadelphia and at UPR-M, will focus on ribonucleic acid (RNA), the tiny molecule essential to genetic expression and protein synthesis that played a key role in the COVID-19 vaccines and saved tens of millions of lives.

The facility will use AI to design, optimize and synthesize RNA and delivery vehicles by augmenting human expertise, enabling rapid iterative experimentation, and providing predictive models and automated workflows to accelerate discovery and innovation.

“With NSF AIRFoundry, we are creating a hub for innovation in RNA technology that will empower scientists to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges, from health care to environmental sustainability,” says Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Penn Engineering and NSF AIRFoundry’s director.

“Our goal is to make cutting-edge RNA research accessible to a broad scientific community beyond the health care sector, accelerating basic research and discoveries that can lead to new treatments, improved crops and more resilient ecosystems,” adds Nobel laureate Drew Weissman, Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research in Penn Medicine, Director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation and NSF AIRFoundry’s senior associate director.

The facility will catalyze new innovations in the field by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). AI has already shown great promise in drug discovery, poring over vast amounts of data to find hidden patterns. “By integrating artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing techniques, the NSF AIRFoundry will revolutionize how we design and produce RNA-based solutions,” says David Issadore, Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the facility’s associate director of research coordination.

Read the full story on the Penn AI website.

August 29, 2024August 28, 2024

Student Builds on Zhiliang Chen’s Osteoarthritis Research

by Erica Moser

Rising second-year Sidney Wong, right, spent the summer working in the lab of Penn Vet professor Kyla Ortved, left, through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program.

Roughly one in three Americans suffers from osteoarthritis, a progressive disease that causes joint cartilage to break down in a vicious cycle. The less cartilage, the more wear and tear on the joints, which further weakens the remaining connective tissue. In addition to joint pain, the condition can lead to loss of joint function, making it extremely hard to complete tasks of daily living.

At present, osteoarthritis has no cure. Zhiliang Cheng, Research Associate Professor in Bioengineering (BE), has studied the use of nanotechnology to treat the disease for years. In collaboration with Ling Qin, Professor in Orthopedic Surgery within the Perelman School of Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group, Cheng developed nanoparticles that activate the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway, increasing the expression of genes that promote healthy cartilage.

This summer, Sidney Wong, a rising second-year in the School of Arts and Sciences, built on Cheng and Qin’s research in the lab of Kyla Ortved, Jacques Jenny Endowed Term Chair of Orthopedic Surgery and Associate Professor in Large Animal Surgery at the School of Veterinary Medicine, studying the EGFR pathway in horses, whose joints resemble those of humans.

“What I’ve observed so far has been pretty promising,” says Wong, who found that equine cartilage treated with the nanoparticles appears healthier.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

August 28, 2024August 28, 2024

Mining the Microbiome: Uncovering New Antibiotics Inside the Human Gut

by Ian Scheffler

*Penn Engineering and Stanford researchers leveraged AI to discover dozens of potential new antibiotics in the human gut microbiome. (ChrisChrisW via Getty Images)*

The average human gut contains roughly 100 trillion microbes, many of which are constantly competing for limited resources. “It’s such a harsh environment,” says César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering within the School of Engineering and Applied Science, in Psychiatry and Microbiology within the Perelman School of Medicine, and in Chemistry within the School of Arts & Sciences. “You have all these bacteria coexisting, but also fighting each other. Such an environment may foster innovation.”

In that conflict, de la Fuente’s lab sees potential for new antibiotics, which may one day contribute to humanity’s own defensive stockpile against drug-resistant bacteria. After all, if the bacteria in the human gut have to develop new tools in the fight against one another to survive, why not use their own weapons against them?

In a new paper in Cell, the labs of de la Fuente and Ami S. Bhatt, Professor in Medicine (Hematology) and Genetics at Stanford, surveyed the gut microbiomes of nearly 2,000 people, discovering dozens of potential new antibiotics. “We think of biology as an information source,” says de la Fuente. “Everything is just code. And if we can come up with algorithms that can sort through that code, we can dramatically accelerate antibiotic discovery.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

August 22, 2024August 22, 2024

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.

August 1, 2024July 24, 2024

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.

July 31, 2024July 24, 2024

Innovation in Action: Penn Engineering’s 2024 Senior Design Project Competition

by Ian Scheffler

BE’s award-winning team, Epilog, at the 2024 Senior Design Awards.

How do you make robotics kits affordable for children in low-income countries? Speed up the manufacturing of organs-on-a-chip? Lower the environmental impact of condiments in restaurants?

If you’re a senior at Penn Engineering, the answer is to team up with your peers in the Senior Design Project Competition, which every year draws interdisciplinary groups from across the School’s six majors to solve real-world problems. Championed by the late Walter Korn (EE’57, GEE’68), a past president of the Engineering Alumni Society (EAS), Senior Design also invites alumni back to campus to evaluate the seniors’ year-long capstone projects.

Since the program started nearly two decades ago, hundreds of alumni have shared centuries’ worth of their collective experience with soon-to-be-minted graduates in the form of constructive feedback. “Senior Design is really one of the best days at Penn Engineering,” says Bradley Richards (C’92, LPS’17), Director of Alumni Relations, who manages the program. “Faculty advisors work with students all year long to bring out the best in each group’s efforts, and the results speak for themselves.”

This year, three student teams from each of Penn Engineering’s six departments — Bioengineering (BE), Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Computer and Information Science (CIS), Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) — presented their work to more than 60 alumni in person and online.

Judges’ Choice Award

The Judges’ Choice Award, which recognizes overall excellence, went to ESE’s VivoDisk, which developed a novel machine to manufacture organs-on-a-chip for Vivodyne, a startup launched by Dan Huh, Associate Professor in BE.

As one of the team members, Akash Chauhan (ENG’24), learned while interning for Vivodyne, assembling the stacks of organs-on-a-chip, which are collections of plastic plates containing cells that simulate organs for preclinical drug testing, is extremely finicky and time consuming.

By developing a machine that could automatically align the plates with high precision using computer vision and AI, the team reduced the disks’ manufacturing time and expense, leading Vivodyne to adopt the device for commercial use, accelerating the process of drug discovery. VivoDisk’s team members included Chauhan; Angela Rodriguez (ENG’24), Aliris Tang (ENG’24, W’24), Dagny Lott (ENG’24), Simone Kwee (ENG’24) and Vraj Satashia (ENG’24, GEN’25) and was advised by Sid Deliwala, Alfred Moore Senior Fellow and Director of Lab Programs in ESE, and Jan Van der Spiegel, Professor in ESE.

Technology and Innovation Award

One of the greatest challenges for children with epilepsy is status epilepticus, an abnormal type of long-lasting seizure that is hard to distinguish from typical seizures and that has a mortality rate of 30%. There is currently no way to perform a test for status epilepticus at home, meaning that children suspected of having the condition must be rushed to the hospital for an electroencephalogram.

Epilog, a team from BE, developed a novel, wearable headset that analyzes brainwaves to accurately determine whether or not a child suffering a seizure is actually suffering from status epilepticus. The team, composed of Rohan Chhaya (ENG’24, GEN’24), Carly Flynn (ENG’24), Elena Grajales (ENG’24), Priya Shah (ENG’24, GEN’25) and Doris Xu (ENG’24) and advised by Erin Berlew, Research Scientist in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Lecturer in BE, carefully validated the device’s accuracy.

The judges recognized Epilog’s technological expertise, which ran the gamut from software to hardware, including a custom app to work with the device and carefully considered features like electrodes whose position can be adjusted to accommodate a child’s growth over time.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

July 29, 2024July 24, 2024

2024 CAREER Award Recipient: Flavia Vitale

by Melissa Pappas

Neurological disorders such as epilepsy, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and certain forms of dementia are the leading cause of disability and second-leading cause of disease worldwide. These disorders disproportionately affect low-resourced communities due to lack of access to specialized healthcare, and many of these complex diseases lack curative solutions. The need to address neurological disorders is high, yet current diagnostics and treatments are not effective for preventative or personalized care and are not accessible or affordable enough to meet the needs of more than 3 billion people living with neurological disorders.

Flavia Vitale, Associate Professor in Bioengineering in Penn Engineering and in Neurology in Penn Medicine, works to meet this need, developing accessible and affordable solutions for the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of people with neurological disorders.

“I started my research career in biomedical engineering hoping to one day help humanity,” says Vitale, who is also a 2024 recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her work. “But it wasn’t until I gained a more diverse skill set during my doctoral and postdoctoral research across chemical engineering and materials science that I was able to do that in a real way.”

Vitale’s multidisciplinary skills are what allow her to develop devices that help people living with brain disorders. The CAREER Award is now helping her further apply those skills and actualize some of her first long-term research projects at Penn.

“This CAREER Award will support my lab’s current research in leveraging innovation in materials and fabrication approaches to develop devices that are able to interface with and control different chemical and electrical signals inside the brain,” she says.

Focused primarily on understanding the brain activity involved in epilepsy-induced seizures, Vitale aims to design and develop brain-interface devices to pinpoint and suppress uncontrolled brain activity to prevent seizures from happening. Her work will lead to revolutionary health care for the 30% of epilepsy patients whose conditions are drug resistant. Currently those patients either wait out the uncontrolled brain activity and oftentimes life-threatening convulsions, or hope to be eligible for invasive surgeries to remove the part of the brain where seizures originate or to implant the seizure-controlling devices that are currently available.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

July 26, 2024July 24, 2024

Measuring Chaos: Using Machine Learning to Satisfy Our Need to Know

by Melissa Pappas

How do we measure chaos and why would we want to? Together, Penn engineers Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering, and postdoctoral researcher Kieran Murphy leverage the power of machine learning to better understand chaotic systems, opening doors for new information analyses in both theoretical modeling and real-world scenarios.

Humans have been trying to understand and predict chaotic systems such as weather patterns, the movement of planets and population ecology for thousands of years. While our models have continued to improve over time, there will always remain a barrier to perfect prediction. That’s because these systems are inherently chaotic. Not in the sense that blue skies and sunshine can turn into thunderstorms and torrential downpours in a second, although that does happen, but in the sense that mathematically, weather patterns and other chaotic systems are governed by physics with nonlinear characteristics.

“This nonlinearity is fundamental to chaotic systems,” says Murphy. “Unlike linear systems, where the information you start with to predict what will happen at timepoints in the future stays consistent over time, information in nonlinear systems can be both lost and generated through time.”

Like a game of telephone where information from the original source gets lost as it travels from person to person while new words and phrases are added to fill in the blanks, outcomes in chaotic systems become harder to predict as time passes. This information decay thwarts our best efforts to accurately forecast the weather more than a few days out.

“You could put millions of probes in the atmosphere to measure wind speed, temperature and precipitation, but you cannot measure every single atom in the system,” says Murphy. “You must have some amount of uncertainty, which will then grow, and grow quickly. So while a prediction for the weather in a few hours might be fairly accurate, that growth in uncertainty over time makes it impossible to predict the weather a month from now.”

In their recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, Murphy and Bassett applied machine learning to classic models of chaos, physicists’ reproductions of chaotic systems that do not contain any external noise or modeling imperfections, to design a near-perfect measurement of chaotic systems to one day improve our understanding of systems including weather patterns.

“These controlled systems are testbeds for our experiments,” says Murphy. “They allow us to compare with theoretical predictions and carefully evaluate our method before moving to real-world systems where things are messy and much less is known. Eventually, our goal is to make ‘information maps’ of real-world systems, indicating where information is created and identifying what pieces of information in a sea of seemingly random data are important.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

July 19, 2024July 17, 2024

Shedding Light on Cellular Metabolism to Fight Disease

by Melissa Pappas

Enamored by the chemical processes of life, Yihui Shen, J. Peter and Geri Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Bioengineering, started her research career as a chemist studying the way that proteins fold and the intricate dynamics underlying life processes.

“As an undergraduate, I studied physical chemistry, thinking that one day I’d be addressing challenges in hardcore STEM fields,” she says. “It wasn’t until I observed the dynamics of a single protein molecule that I fell in love with microscopy. I realized that this imaging tool could not only help us observe biological processes on a small scale, but it could also provide new insight at the interface of engineering, chemistry and physics and solve problems on a large scale.”

When Shen turned her attention to microscopy, the field itself was advancing quickly, with improvements being made and new techniques being released every month. Without missing a beat, Shen dove deeper into the most current tools available when she joined Dr. Wei Min’s lab at Columbia University as a doctoral student.

“Professor Wei Min is a pioneer in a new imaging technique called coherent Raman imaging,” says Shen. “In this type of microscopy, we focus light on a very specific point in the cell and measure the amount of scattered light that comes back after exchanging energy with the molecular vibration. This approach allows us to visualize the spatial distribution of different molecules, the very chemistry of life I had studied as an undergraduate, at a high enough resolution to gain insights into biological processes, such as tissue organization, drug distribution and cellular metabolism.”

With this new tool under her belt, Shen was able to ask the kinds of questions that could connect the use of this observation tool to practical applications for real-world challenges.

“I started thinking outside the box,” says Shen. “What if we could observe the chemical exchanges involved in metabolism as they are happening on the scale of a single cell, and then use that insight to pinpoint the exact metabolic pathways and molecules that facilitate tumor growth and disease?”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024

Penn ADAPT “Hacks” Bedsores, Wins Prize

Team Current Care (Andrew Lee, Antranig Baghdassarian, Johnson Liu, Leah Lackey, Brianna Leung, and Justin Liu), took home the $3,000 Grand Prize in the Cornell Hackathon.

Brianna Leung, a rising senior majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Neuroscience and Healthcare Management at the University of Pennsylvania, led a diverse team of student scientists and engineers to resounding success at the 2024 Cornell Health Tech Hackathon, where the team won the $3,000 Grand Prize.

Held in March 2024 on Cornell’s campus in New York City, the event brought together students from 29 different universities for a weekend of finding “hacks” to patient wellness and healthcare issues inspired by the theme of “patient safety.”

ADAPT members enjoy a pancake-making marathon in preparation for their pancake sale.

Leung serves as President of Penn Assistive Devices and Prosthetic Technologies (ADAPT), a medical-device project club whose members pursue personal projects, community partnerships and national design competitions. Penn ADAPT’s activities range from designing, building and improving assistive medical devices for conditions such as cerebral palsy and limb loss, to community engagement activities like their semesterly 3D-printed pancake sale.

In her role, Leung has increased the program’s hackathon participation to give club members greater exposure to fast-paced, competition-based design. She also leads the HMS School project, which develops and manufactures switch interfaces for children with cerebral palsy, enabling these students to interact with computers.

Leung’s passion for medical devices extends to her academic research. As a member of the robotics lab of Cynthia Sung, Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering, Leung characterizes origami patterns for energy-saving applications in the heart and in facial reconstruction. Leung has also served as Vice President External for the Penn Lions and Vice President of Member Engagement for the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club, and belongs to the Phi Gamma Nu professional business fraternity.

ADAPT members working on medical devices.

For the Cornell Hackathon, Leung’s team developed a prototype for Current Care, a closed-loop device to prevent pressure ulcers through electrical muscle stimulation. Pressure ulcers, often called bed sores, result from prolonged pressure, which often occurs during extended hospitalization or in patients who are bedridden. This condition is exacerbated by understaffing and strained resources, and can create an extra burden on hospitals, patients and healthcare workers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that pressure ulcers cost the U.S. healthcare system approximately $9.1 billion to $11.6 billion per year.

Current Care is designed to deliver electrical stimulation, which increases blood flow to affected body parts. Conceptualizing and designing complex devices on short notice is the nature of a hackathon, so the team focused their efforts on creating proof-of-concept prototypes for all the different sensors required for the device, as well as providing the judges with on-screen read-outs to demonstrate the logic and hypothetical inputs for the device.

For their design, the team was awarded the $3,000 Grand Prize in the Cornell Hackathon. In addition to Leung, the team consisted of Johnson Liu (Cornell ECE & MSE’26); Antranig Baghdassarian (Cornell BME’27); Andrew Lee (Weill Cornell M.D.’25); Leah Lackey (Cornell ECE Ph.D.’28); and Justin Liu (Northeastern CS’27).

In choosing a project, Leung was inspired by her late grandmother’s experiences. “My role on the team largely consisted of coordinating and leading aspects of its development as needed. I also ultimately presented our idea to the judges,” she says. “This was actually all of my teammates’ first hackathon, so it was really exciting to serve a new role (considering it was actually only my second hackathon!). I had a lot of fun working with them, and we have actually been meeting regularly since the event to continue to work on the project. We had a range of expertise and experience on our team, and I deeply appreciate their hard work and enthusiasm for a project that means so much to me.”

Having found success at the Cornell hackathon, the team is discussing next steps for Current Care. “Our team is still very motivated to continue working on the project, and we’ve been speaking with professors across all of our schools to discuss feasibility and design plans moving forward,” says Leung.

Several other projects developed by Penn ADAPT members were recognized in the Cornell Hackathon:

ADAPT members and Hackathon participants, left to right: Brianna Leung, Rebecca Wang, Claire Zhang, Amy Luo, Mariam Rizvi, Natey Kim, Joe Kojima. Also in attendance but not pictured: Suhani Patel, Harita Trivedi, Dwight Koyner.

Claire Zhang, a sophomore studying Bioengineering and Biology in the VIPER program, was a member and presenter for team CEDAR (winner of Most Innovative/2nd Place), a portable ultrasound imaging device used to monitor carotid artery stenosis development in rural areas.
Natey Kim, a sophomore in Bioengineering, was a member and presenter for team HMSS (finalist), a low-cost digital solution for forecasting infections in hospitals.
Rebecca Wang, a sophomore in Bioengineering and Social Chair of Penn ADAPT, was a member of Team Femnostics (winner of Most Market Ready/4th Place) which developed QuickSense, an all-in-one diagnostic tool that streamlines testing for a handful of the most common vaginal disease infections simultaneously.
Mariam Rizvi, a sophomore in Computational Biology, was a member of team IPVision (winner of Most Potential Impact/5th Place), an application programming interface (or API) that integrates into electronic health records such as Epic, leveraging AI to detect intimate partner violence cases and provide personalized treatment in acute-care settings.
Suhani Patel and Dwight Koyner worked with team RealAIs, which developed a full-stack multi-platform application using React Native and Vertex AI on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Patel, a sophomore double majoring in Bioengineering and Computer and Information Science in Penn Engineering, serves as ADAPT’s treasurer, while Koyner is a first-year M&T student studying Business and Systems Engineering in Penn Engineering and Wharton.