A Decade of BETA Day: Shaping the Success of Future Bioengineers

by Katherine Sas

Students learn about bioengineering in the BE Labs at the inaugural BETA Day (credit: Felice Macera)

Last year marked not just the 50th anniversary of the Department of Bioengineering (BE) but the 10th anniversary of Bioengineer-Teach-Aspire (BETA) Day, one of the most beloved and impactful programs run by the Graduate Association of Bioengineers (GABE).

BETA Day, an annual event in which a diverse group of Philadelphia middle school students learns about bioengineering and a variety of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields from BE graduate students, has grown into an institution, one whose impact no one could have foreseen.

GABE’s original goal was to provide social opportunities for BE graduate students. While this is still an important function of the group, in the mid-2010s, students and board members found themselves looking for opportunities to provide more formalized outreach and mentorship. They wanted to have an impact on Philadelphia and cultivate the next generation of bioengineers.

The Seeds of BETA Day

Benjamin Freedman, a principal investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and founder of biotech startup Limax Biosciences, earned his doctorate in Bioengineering in the lab of Louis Soslowsky, Fairhill Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery within the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) and in Bioengineering within the School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering). Freedman played a key role in BETA Day’s founding. 

In 2009, Freedman, then an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, attended a talk at the City College of New York (CCNY), which sparked his interest in mentorship. Sheldon Weinbaum, a Distinguished Professor in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at CCNY and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) inaugural diversity award winner, spoke about “fulfilling the dream” of mentorship and the struggle for inclusion in STEM fields, echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Inspired by this encounter, Freedman got involved with a mentorship program during his senior year. He later signed up for a lunch with Weinbaum to talk about mentorship. Freedman recalls that Weinbaum’s face “lit up” when he realized that this student didn’t just want to talk science but was genuinely interested in inclusion, diversity and mentorship.

Arriving at Penn Engineering and PSOM for graduate school in 2011, Freedman joined GABE, bringing this passion and experience with him and helping GABE to shape and clarify their outreach and mentorship programs. 

From Campus to Community

Along with other GABE board members, such as Cori Riggin and Shauna Dorsey, Freedman worked over the course of a year and a half to identify the mentorship needs within BE and gauge student interest. David Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor and then Chair of BE, and former BE faculty Susan Margulies, now Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, were particularly involved in these discussions. 

Benjamin Freedman (left) addresses the first BE mentoring cohort (credit: Felice Macera)

The GABE board reorganized to include mentorship and outreach chairs, and eventually started a formal mentorship program in partnership with the Penn undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The mentorship program continues to this day, creating opportunities for BE graduate students to engage with undergraduate concerns through one-on-one meetings to discuss career or graduate school advice, summer BBQ’s, roundtable discussions and monthly meetups.

With an internal mentorship program established, the team turned their focus to Philadelphia. Initially, GABE established a partnership with iPraxis, a local STEM education non-profit, to do some outreach activities in middle schools. This partnership resulted in an Outstanding Outreach Award from the national Biomedical Engineering Society in 2014. But with the department’s 40th anniversary approaching, GABE’s members wanted to do something spectacular to celebrate and give back to the community.

Service Learning in Action

By then, Ocek Eke, Director of Graduate Students Programming at Penn Engineering, had been recently appointed Director of Global and Local Service Learning Programs. Eke provided Freedman and GABE advice on setting up effective outreach programs and to determine what resources the School could contribute. “We have a role to play to fulfill our mission,” Eke says, citing Penn’s motto, “Leges Sine Moribus Vanae,” which translates to “Laws without morals are useless.”

GABE’s efforts were part of a “wave” of interest in outreach and community service in both the department and the School, Eke remembers, including the undergraduate group Access Engineering and several service learning courses which took students to Asia, Africa and Central America. He was impressed by the lack of cynicism in the BE student body. “These are students who saw a need, who are passionate about what they want to achieve. They could have just been comfortable but were willing to go and stick their necks out. They used the resources we have here in Penn Engineering to address these needs.”

A (BETA) Day to Remember

The first BETA Day took place at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, which had only just opened. Held with the enthusiastic participation of around 70 middle schoolers, and almost as many volunteers, the event included a full day of programming, with representation from every Penn Engineering department. There were science talks, workshops, and even a drone demo with Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering. The entire day was student-driven and staffed by volunteers, demonstrating the students’ commitment to making a difference.

The first annual BETA Day was held in the Singh Center for Nanotechnology (credit: Felice Macera)

GABE never imagined BETA Day as an annual event, but the first instance was so successful, it became hard to imagine not repeating it. Ten years later, the GABE board continues to introduce bioengineering to a diverse and ambitious group of middle schoolers every spring. 

In recent years, the location has shifted to other venues, including Pennovation Works, in Gray’s Ferry, and BE’s own education lab, the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace. Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab has also become a key collaborator in BETA Day. 

In 2021, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the industrious and creative GABE board even tailored BETA Day activities to be held in an entirely virtual environment. “These types of events are not as successful when they’re only initiated by faculty,” says Freedman. Generating and sustaining student involvement has been a cornerstone of BETA Day’s continued success.

The Legacy of BETA Day

GABE’s mentorship efforts have grown as well, changing to meet evolving student needs. The mentorship program now involves students being placed in “families” of around four undergraduates and two graduate students, spanning a range of class years and experience levels. A third student association, the Master’s Association in Bioengineers (MAB), was established to better foster community and facilitate opportunities for master’s students.  

The department also launched an applicant support program in 2020, enhancing BE’s mission of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion by pairing Ph.D. applicants to current doctoral students, who serve as mentors to help navigate the admissions process, giving feedback on application materials and providing other support to prospective students.

Structures of support and outreach activities like BETA Day have become a key emphasis of the department’s graduate student recruitment, helping to attract students who value the department’s core mission and increasing opportunities for underserved or underrepresented communities.

The legacy of that original BETA Day also continues in Freedman’s Lab. After graduating in 2017, having served on the GABE board and as President from 2015-2016, Freedman continued to mentor over 20 students during his postdoctoral research at Harvard. He is now building his own independent lab where diversity, mentorship and outreach are foundational pillars.

A Nebula of Inspiration

Perhaps the most consequential impact of BETA Day is the impression it makes on the middle schoolers who participate each year. “To really get to know what happens on BETA Day and what it’s true impact is, you need to experience it,” says Ravi Radhakrishnan, Herman P. Schwan Chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Professor in Bioengineering and in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. 

The legacy of BETA Day continues into its second decade. (credit: Afraah Shamim, BE Labs)

“I walked into the Stephenson Foundation Education Lab during BETA Day 2024,” recalls Radhakrishnan, “and what I saw was teams of teenagers tinkering with pipes that were clogged, strategizing on unclogging them without damaging them: an assignment that got them thinking in teams about how to prevent heart attacks. 

“Expose these young minds to design thinking, versatile tools, and critical problems in biomedical engineering, and the elegant solutions they brainstorm are truly mind blowing. BETA Day is like the nebula where future biomedical stars are born.”

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).

Understanding the Cellular Mechanisms Driving Solid Tumors’ Robust Defense System

by Nathi Magubane

In a collaborative interdisciplinary study, Michael Mitchell of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Wei Guo of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine show that solid tumors can block drug-delivery mechanisms with a “forcefield-like” effect but certain genetic elements that can effectively “shut down” the forcefield. Their findings hint at new targets for delivering cancer treatments that use the body’s immune system to fight tumors. (Image: iStock / CIPhotos)

The tumor microenvironment—an ad hoc, messy amalgamation of signaling molecules, immune cells, fibroblasts, blood vessels, and the extracellular matrix—acts like a “powerful security system that protects solid tumors from invaders seeking to destroy them,” says Michael Mitchell, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania working on nanoscale therapeutics aimed at targeting cancers.

“A lot like the Death Star with its surrounding fleet of fighter ships and protective shields, solid tumors can use features like immune cells and vasculature to exert force, acting as a physical barrier to rebel forces (nanoparticles) coming in to deliver the payload that destroys it,” Mitchell says.

Now, researchers in the Mitchell lab have teamed up with Wei Guo’s group in the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn and Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine to figure out the molecular mechanisms that make tumor microenvironments seemingly impenetrable and found that small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are secreted by tumor cells and act as a “forcefield,” blocking therapeutics. Their findings are published in Nature Materials.

“This discovery reveals how tumors create a robust defense system, making it challenging for nanoparticle-based therapies to reach and effectively target cancer cells,” Guo says. “By understanding the cellular mechanisms driving these responses, we can potentially develop strategies to disable this defense, allowing therapeutics to penetrate and attack the tumor more efficiently.”

The research builds on a prior collaboration between Guo and Mitchell’s labs, wherein the teams focused on how tumor-associated immune cells, known as macrophages, contribute to the suppression of anti-tumor immunity by secreting extracellular vesicles.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

Michael Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Lipid Nanoparticle Synthesis Core at the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Wei Guo is the Hirsch Family President’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

Ningqiang Gong, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Mitchell lab at Penn Engineering, is an assistant professor at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Wenqun Zhong is a reseearch associate in the Guo Laboratory in Penn Arts & Sciences.

Other authors include: Alex G Hamilton, Dongyoon Kim, Junchao Xu, and Lulu Xue of Penn Engineering; Junhyong Kim, Zhiyuan Qin, and Fengyuan Xu of Penn Arts & Sciences; Mohamad-Gabriel Alameh and Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine; Andrew E. Vaughn and Gan Zhao of the Penn School of Veterinary Medicine; Jinghong Li and Xucong Teng of the University of Beijing; and Xing-Jie Liang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

This research received support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (DP2 TR002776, R35 GM141832, and NCI P50 CA261608), Burroughs Wellcome Fund, U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award (CBET-2145491), and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant (RGS-22-1122-01-ET.)

Melding AI and RNA: Penn’s $18 Million AIRFoundry to Revolutionize RNA Research

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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.

Student Builds on Zhiliang Chen’s Osteoarthritis Research

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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.

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.

Knockout of CD5 on CAR T Cells Boosts Anti-Tumor Efficacy

by Meagan Raeke

The effectiveness of CAR T cell therapy against a variety of cancers, including solid tumors, could be boosted greatly by using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to knock out the gene for CD5, a protein found on the surface of T cells, according to a preclinical study from investigators at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center.

CAR T cells are T cells that have been engineered to attack specific targets found on cancer cells. They have had remarkable results in some patients with blood cancers. But they have not performed well against other cancers including solid-tumor cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and melanoma. Researchers have been searching for techniques to boost the effectiveness of CAR T cell therapy.

The study, published today in Science Immunology, suggests that knocking out CD5 could be a prime technique. Illuminating the protein’s previously murky role, the researchers found that it works as a powerful immune checkpoint, reining in T cell effectiveness. Removing it, they showed, dramatically enhanced CAR T cell anticancer activity in a variety of preclinical cancer models.

“We’ve discovered in preclinical models that CD5 deletion greatly enhances the function of CAR T cells against multiple cancers,” said senior author Marco Ruella, MD, an assistant professor of Hematology-Oncology, researcher with the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and the scientific director of Penn Medicine’s Lymphoma Program. “The striking effects we observed across preclinical models suggest that CD5 knockout could be a general strategy for enhancing CAR T cell function.”

The study’s first author is Ruchi Patel, PhD, a recent graduate student from the Ruella Laboratory.

Read the full story in Penn Medicine News.

Marco Ruella is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group. Read more stories featuring Ruella in the BE Blog.

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.

Highways to Health: Bicontinuous Structures Speed Up Cell Migration

by Ian Scheffler

Bicontinuous materials, like this representation of a cube of gelatin and hyaluronic acid, have greater internal surface area, allowing cells to travel faster between two points. (Credit: Karen Xu)

One of the most important but least understood aspects of healing is cell migration, or the process of cells moving from one part of the body to another. “If you are an ambulance out in the woods,” says Karen Xu, an M.D/Ph.D. student in Medicine and Bioengineering, “and there are no paths for you to move forward, it will be a lot harder for you to get to a site that needs you.”

Earlier this year, Xu co-authored a paper in Nature Communications describing a new cue to help cells get to where they need to go: a material made chiefly of hyaluronic acid and gelatin, two gooey substances commonly found outside cells in joints and connective tissue.

“Hundreds of thousands of people tear their meniscus every year,” says Robert Mauck, Mary Black Ralston Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery in Penn Medicine and Professor in Bioengineering at Penn Engineering and one of Xu’s advisors, as well as a senior author on the paper. “This material could potentially speed up their recovery.”

What makes the material — known as a hydrogel due to its blend of gelatinous matter and water — unique is that the combination of hyaluronic acid and gelatin forms a complex network of paths, providing cells many different ways to travel between two points.

This property is known as bicontinuity, and is exemplified by two discrete continuous phases that are each connected throughout the entire volume of the material (for example with a sponge, with phases of cellulose and air; in the hydrogel, this is comprised of gelatin and hyaluronic acid) resulting in a dizzying array of patterns that dramatically increase the surface area inside the material.

To test the hydrogel’s efficacy, Xu and her collaborators — including co-advisor Jason Burdick, formerly the Robert D. Bent Professor in Bioengineering at Penn Engineering and now the Bowman Endowed Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the paper’s other senior author — first created several different versions of the hydrogel to find the sweet spot at which the constituents formed the bicontinuous structure and had the highest internal surface area. “We found that a precise combination of the various hydrogel components and control over their mixing was needed to form the bicontinuous structure,” says Burdick.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

From Chance to Certainty: Solving Science’s Reproducibility Crisis

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Jamie Moffa, host of In Plain English; Konrad Kording, Kaela Singleton and Arjun Raj

One of the pillars of science is the idea that experimental results can be replicated. If they cannot be reproduced, what if the findings of an experiment were due just to chance? Over the last two decades, a growing chorus of scientists has raised concerns about the “reproducibility crisis,” in which many published research findings can’t be independently validated, calling into question the rigor of contemporary science.

Two years ago, a group led by Konrad Kording, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor in Bioengineering and Neuroscience, founded the Community For Rigor (C4R) to build a grassroots movement to improve the rigor of scientific research.

Supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and partners at Harvard, Duquesne, Smith College and Johns Hopkins, among other institutions, C4R creates educational materials that teach the principles of rigorous research, from data collection to pre-registration of results. “Everyone has done wrong things,” says Kording. “We’re all making these mistakes and we need to be able to talk about it.”

Last month, Kording appeared on In Plain English, a podcast devoted to making science more accessible, alongside Kaela Singleton, the co-founder and President of Black in Neuro; Arjun Raj, Professor in Bioengineering in Penn Engineering and in Genetics in Penn Medicine; and Jamie Moffa, a physician-scientist in training at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss scientific rigor, including actionable strategies for students and faculty alike.

The conversation touched on everything from successfully managing the reams of data produced by experiments to the power of community to drive cultural change, as well as the difficulty of filtering useful feedback from the noise of social media. “I hope we can get to a point where people feel comfortable sharing what’s working and what’s not working,” says Raj.

Listen to the episode here.