Penn Bioengineering

Congratulations to Ludwig Zhao, Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Penn Engineering, on receiving the 2025-26 President & Provost’s Honor for Developing New Initiatives in Graduate & Professional Student Life.

The award recognizes graduate and professional students who have driven transformative and lasting improvements to student life at Penn.

Zhao was honored for his extensive leadership and service through multiple roles within GAPSA and on University committees, as well as for his sustained advocacy for research students across Penn.

Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition, Ludwig!

https://upenn-gsc.libcal.com/event/16739199

Penn Bioengineering

A pacemaker battery replacement can mean another surgery, another recovery and another round of risks for patients.

For their Senior Design project, Team Cardion asked a powerful question: What if a pacemaker could draw energy from the motion of the heart itself?

Anjali Shukla (BE’26), Nicholas “Nico” Manuto (BE’26), Andrea Perez Pizarro (BE’26), Cesar Ruiz de Castilla (BE’26) and Ella Nevo (BE’26) designed an implantable energy-harvesting pacemaker system and built a mechatronic heart model to test it.

Their ambitious, patient-centered work earned the Technology and Innovation Prize at this year’s Penn Engineering Senior Design Competition.

Read the BE Blog story: https://bit.ly/4dyWoB6

Penn Engineering

Congratulations to Yash Rajpal, who graduated this year with an undergraduate degree in Bioengineering and received a Penn Alumni Student Award of Merit at the 2026 Ivy Day Ceremony.

Ivy Day is one of Penn’s longstanding traditions, honoring graduating students for leadership, service, and lasting contributions to the University community. We are proud to celebrate Yash and all he has accomplished as part of Bioengineering and the Class of 2026.

Read more from Penn Today: https://bit.ly/4uo10jB

Penn Engineering

Meet Team Reel-IV: Priya Agarwal, Anushka Gandhi, Yerahm Hong, Nicole Mirzaian and Ayma Waqar.

For their Bioengineering senior design project, the team focused on a challenge in pediatric care: accidental IV dislodgement. Their device is designed to manage slack in IV tubing through a tension-sensing mechanism, with the goal of improving safety and comfort for hospitalized infants and children.

The project has already earned national recognition across multiple competitions, and the team plans to keep developing Reel-IV through additional prototyping, clinical testing and future hospital pilot programs.

Their work is a powerful example of student engineering grounded in listening, empathy and real clinical need.

Read the full story: https://bit.ly/4unUHfX

Penn Engineering

Congratulations to our 2026 Bioengineering graduate student awardees!

This year’s honorees have been recognized for excellence in research, academics, leadership and service, with awards spanning Penn, Penn Engineering, the Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University’s Knight-Hennessy Scholars program and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

We are proud to celebrate these students and the many ways they are advancing discovery, supporting their peers and shaping what comes next in bioengineering.

Read the full list of honorees and join us in congratulating them: https://beblog.seas.upenn.edu/2026-graduate-awards/

Penn Engineering

This Commencement week, we are celebrating a legacy in motion.

As Brianna Leung (BE’26) graduates from the M.S.E. program, she passes forward Enginuity, a platform she helped build to connect real community needs with student engineers ready to solve them.

What started as a challenge, how to find and sustain meaningful projects, became a scalable solution. Enginuity creates a direct path between organizations and students, accelerating impact across Philadelphia.

Now, Andrew Yao (BE’28) will carry this work forward, continuing to grow a platform rooted in collaboration, empathy, and action.

From one generation of Bioengineering students to the next, this is how impact expands.

Read more: https://beblog.seas.upenn.edu/enginuity/

Penn Engineering

What if we could better understand how to treat rare diseases?

That’s the question behind Yerahm Hong’s (BE’26) research. As a 2026 Rose Undergraduate Research Award recipient, she is exploring a gene therapy approach designed to intercept faulty genetic signals linked to rare pediatric epilepsy before harmful proteins are made.

For families facing conditions with few effective treatments, research like this plays an important role in building knowledge and opening doors to future possibilities.

Through mentorship, hands-on research, and a growing passion for neuroscience, Hong is developing the skills to contribute to this work long term.

Read her story: https://beblog.seas.upenn.edu/rose-award-yerahm-hong/

Penn Engineering

Student ideas. Real-world impact.

Penn ADAPT is a student-led community where engineering meets hands-on problem solving. Students are designing everything from systems that help operating rooms track surgical tools in real time to adaptive equipment informed by work with Center For Adapted Sports.

By working across disciplines and applying what they learn beyond the classroom, students are building solutions that support independence, safety and performance.

See how these projects are growing and reaching beyond campus: https://beblog.seas.upenn.edu/penn-adapt

Penn Engineering

A major milestone for Bioengineering students.

Congratulations to our 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program awardees (GRFP). The NSF GRFP supports outstanding graduate researchers at the start of their careers, recognizing both academic excellence and the potential to make a lasting impact.

This year’s recipients include current Ph.D. students, incoming doctoral students, graduating seniors and undergraduate alumni continuing their research journeys.

The future of bioengineering is already in motion.

Learn more: https://beblog.seas.upenn.edu/2026-nsf-grfp/

Penn Engineering

What happens when you bring 44 high school students to Penn Engineering and ask them to think like bioengineers?

You get a day full of ideas, curiosity, and real problem-solving.

At the first Bioengineering High School Research Competition, hosted by the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), students from across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware worked in teams with Penn mentors to take on bioengineering challenges. Their projects explored everything from CRISPR and targeted therapeutics to microfluidics and AI in medicine, culminating in a live poster session in Levine Lobby.

“I wanted to host this event largely because of my own experience in high school, when I competed in a similar bioengineering research competition at UC Berkeley,” said Saw Nwe, third-year bioengineering student and BMES Outreach Chair. “I hope all the students who participated in the event took away something meaningful as well.”

The day also included a tour of EQuad, an undergraduate panel, and conversations about what it means to pursue research and engineering at the next level.

“This was truly a team effort,” Nwe added, thanking BMES members, volunteers, panelists, and judges who helped bring the event to life.

Built by students, powered by community, shaping what comes next.

Penn Engineering