Ian Scheffler
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.
Thanks to the generous support of Kerry Wisnosky (GEN’88), President and CEO of Quantum Space, four student teams received monetary awards in categories ranging from social impact to technological innovation. Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering, joined Lyle Brunhofer (ENG’14, GEN’14), EAS Vice President and Senior Design Chair, to hand out the awards.
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.
Social Impact Award
“I stand before you today to discuss the emerging national crisis of deepfake videos,” Joe Biden says at the outset of team RAVE’s video presentation. Of course, Joe Biden didn’t actually participate in the team’s project. “As you may have guessed,” Biden continues, “this video is deepfaked, and it only took our team minutes to create.”
Underscoring the importance of deepfakes in the leadup to the presidential election, team RAVE, or “Real-time Augmented Video Evaluator,” developed a cutting-edge tool for detecting deepfake videos, which the judges recognized for its social impact. The CIS team was made up of Katelyn DePaula (EE’24, GEN’25), Henghak Kun (ENG’24), Aviel Resnick (ENG’24, GEN’25), Helen Rudoler (EE’24) and Ryan Oliver (ENG’24, GEN’25) and was advised by Boon Thau Loo, RCA Professor in CIS and Senior Associate Dean for Education and Global Initiatives.
RAVE works by leveraging machine learning to accomplish real-time deepfake monitoring. “With 53% of adults getting their news from social media,” says Rudoler, “it’s imperative that consumers have trust in news sources.”
Leadership Award
Computing power has turned into the new oil, a scarce and expensive resource that undergirds everything from AI to discovering new antibiotics. And yet, nearly two-thirds of the world’s computing power remains idle at any given time, a massive waste of resources.
Enter Parallex, the CIS team made of Vikram Bala (EE’24), Ethan Chee (ENG’24), Anirudh Cowlagi (C’24, ENG’24, GEN’25), Andy Liu (ENG’24, W’24) and Christian Sun (ENG’24, GEN’25) and was also advised by Boon Thau Loo. Their project, a global peer-to-peer network, aims to unlock all that wasted computing power and democratize this increasingly expensive resource.
The team won the leadership award on the strength of their presentation and professionalism, and the extent to which they analyzed the commercial potential of their project.
While some of the participants have already begun work on bringing their inventions to market outside Penn Engineering — Chauhan, from VivoDisk, has actually joined Vivodyne, the startup spun out of Huh’s Lab, as a Senior Engineer, and the company has adopted Vivodisk’s invention — all participants gained invaluable skills from the competition.
“What makes Senior Design unique is the mentorship,” says Brunhofer. “The 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.”
Alumni interested in participating in Senior Design as volunteers can contact Bradley Richards, (C’92, LPS’17), Director of Alumni Relations.