From The School of Engineering and Applied Science
At
The University of Pennsylvania
5.24.24
Nathi Magubane
Eric Sucar-Photographer
Meeting a friend for a warm cup of tea can offer an opportunity to chitchat, shoot the breeze, maybe even brainstorm life’s ups and downs. For Nader Engheta and Firooz Aflatouni of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, a conversation over a cup of tea has sparked some of their brightest ideas, like lightspeed computation by way of metamaterial manipulation.
According to Chinese legend, the first cup of tea was an accident. Shennong, a mythical emperor, boiled a pot of water, only for the wind to add a handful of leaves.
In Penn Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), tea leaves likewise result in happy accidents.
Nader Engheta and Firooz Aflatouni of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science turn tea time into new ideas.
Nader Engheta, H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor, regularly joins his colleague Firooz Aflatouni, associate professor and undergraduate chair in ESE, for a cup of tea in the latter’s office. “We talk about academic life,” says Engheta. “We talk about history, politics.” And, of course, science.
Engheta, who won the Benjamin Franklin Medal last year, is known for his groundbreaking contributions to the design of materials that interact with electromagnetic waves at tiny scales with unprecedented functionalities. More than a decade ago, the Department recruited Aflatouni, who specializes in the design of electronic and photonic chips, and Engheta became his mentor. “We come from different angles to the field of optics,” says Engheta.
Over tea, the two brew up new ideas. While perhaps not as directly inspired by teatime as James Watt, who famously experimented with kettles en route to inventing the steam engine, the pair nonetheless finds that ideas rise like the steam from their teacups. “It’s a pleasure to collaborate with Firooz,” says Engheta. “We love to see how we can bring our ideas together.”
Despite their exceedingly busy schedules, Nader Engheta and Firooz Aflatouni try to meet up for tea in Aflatouni’s office at least once a month for a chat.
How tea catalyzes collaboration and recent results
Most recently, the two devised a novel chip that uses light rather than electricity to perform vector-matrix multiplication, a key mathematical operation in the training of neural networks, the computer systems powering AI tools like ChatGPT.
“The potential impact is enormous,” says Stefano Maci, professor of electromagnetics and antennas at the University of Siena, and a longtime professional colleague of Engheta’s, “since matrix multiplication is fundamental to many operations in AI and machine learning.”
Inspired by biological brains, neural networks store information as long lists of numbers, known as vectors. Each time the network learns something new, the numbers must change, just as the synapses connecting neurons strengthen or weaken in response to new experiences.
To encode new knowledge, the network multiplies each vector’s initial values by a set of other numbers called weights, which are formatted in grids of rows and columns, an arrangement known as a matrix.
Just like the brain, which demands roughly one-fifth of the average human’s resting metabolism, the sheer number of matrix multiplications required to train neural networks consumes vast amounts of energy.
Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency reported that, by 2026, data centers worldwide—where companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta develop neural networks—will require as much energy as Japan.
Conventional computer chips require so much energy in part because of the nature of electricity. Unlike lightwaves, which can travel in parallel without disrupting one another, the electrons moving through traditional computer chips have to achieve one function after the other. Computer chips even have a “clock” signal to synchronize the passage of information.
In a chip powered by light, by contrast, everything happens almost at once, at the speed of light. “As the lightwave travels, the computation takes place,” says Aflatouni.
In the time it takes a traditional computer chip to perform a single matrix multiplication, a light-based chip can perform all required multiplications within the network and classify the input data.
Similar paths, different waves
In a curious way, the careers of Engheta and Aflatouni echo one another. Both researchers migrated to the United States from Iran, after earning bachelor’s degrees from universities in Tehran. They each then earned doctoral degrees in Los Angeles: Engheta studied at the California Institute of Technology [Caltech] and Aflatouni at the University of Southern California (USC) and then Caltech for his postdoc.
Both then made their way to Penn Engineering, Engheta in the 1980s and Aflatouni the 2010s. Their connection started simply because of their shared interest in light, but strengthened into a bond. “Nader is my mentor,” says Aflatouni.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Engheta and Aflatouni approach their research from complementary directions. “We always start from the theory,” Engheta says of his group. Aflatouni and his group, by contrast, focus on the experimental aspects—fabricating and measuring, rather than theorizing, new chips.
“A lot of times we get together,” says Aflatouni, of his and Engheta’s teatimes, “basically talking about the really interesting ideas coming from Nader and his group, and have a back-and-forth of me saying, ‘Oh, this, we can do this. We cannot do that.’”
The two wondered if it would be possible to apply the theory behind one of Engheta’s earlier projects—in which he developed a material that could compute and solve integrals equations, another important mathematical operation—onto a smaller platform, made entirely of silicon, using lightwaves rather than microwaves. “That’s where the expertise of Firooz came into play,” says Engheta.
Fabrication challenges
The number of commercial foundries or “fabs” capable of producing chips like the one Engheta and Aflatouni imagined is exceedingly small, and the pair wondered if a foundry would even accept their new design.
Foundries typically only accept submissions a few times a year, through a process known as the “tape out,” a reference to when chip designs came on magnetic tape, and have strict rules about what can and cannot be fabricated. “Maybe the radius of curvature of one part of the chip turns out to be two nanometers,” says Engheta. “The foundry might say, we cannot make two nanometers—go back and redesign it.”
As a result, Aflatouni and Engheta had to repeatedly redesign the chip, essentially making it conform to commercial specifications and eligible for mass production.
Fortunately, Engheta and Aflatouni weren’t alone in attempting to overcome this hurdle—they had extremely capable collaborators, who brought their own mugs to the conversation.
More mugs
Prior to joining the Engheta Group, Vahid Nikkhah, a doctoral candidate and the first author of the paper, was also an avid tea drinker. “But since leaving Iran and moving to the U.S.,” he quips, “I’ve mostly switched to coffee.”
Much like Aflatouni and Engheta, Nikkhah, who has a background in physics and electrical engineering, has long been enthusiastic about imagining how to use waves to do more than stir about flavonoids in a teacup.
“I was really drawn in by Professor Engheta’s approach to tackling the fundamental goals of physicists working in this space,” Nikkhah says. “Using light waves for computation isn’t wholly new, in the sense that researchers have been exploring this since the 1960s, but altering the very nature of materials at the atomic scale to sculpt the path of light and perform calculations presents an exciting, boundless paradigm in computing.”
This process, Nikkhah explains, is basically like channeling light through a tunnel, where a series of strategically placed objects in the middle distort and bounce the light, so that by the time the light reaches the other side, it has been measurably transformed.
The light from the source represents an input for this system; the altered light at the end of the tunnel is the output, now encoding new information that depends on how the light was manipulated.
These transformations, of course, have to be both desirable and predictable—two extreme challenges when working with materials at tiny scales. The objects that interact with the light are known as “metamaterials,” a special class of human-made materials whose elements are assembled in ways that imbue them with properties rarely found in nature.
In contrast to Nader and Aflatouni’s focus on the overall design of the new chip, Nikkhah worked on structuring the metamaterials themselves so that they altered some of the incoming light’s fundamental properties, such as the height of its waves (amplitude), position in its cycle at a given time (phase), orientation of its oscillations (polarization), the distance between successive wave crests (wavelength), and the number of wave crests passing a point per second (frequency), in as predictable manner as possible.
The result, as Maci at the University of Siena, describes it, is a silicon microstructure with input and output ports.
In the microstructure, the three tendrils on the left are the input ports, which receive incoming lightwaves. The lightwaves change as they bounce around the complex structure in the middle, before exiting the output ports on the right, which carry the matrix-vector product in the form of outgoing lightwaves. (Image: Courtesy of Firooz Aflatouni)
The whole process is performed at the speed of light, and the entire structure takes up a minuscule amount of space: The flat, silicon chip is just about 23 microns (or millionths of a meter) in width and about 34 microns in length. For context, one micron is about 1/100 the thickness of a strand of human hair.
To engineer the metamaterials so that they could consistently manipulate these properties of light, Nikkhah employed inverse design, a method by which the desired outcomes are specified first, and then the structures necessary to achieve these results are uncovered using optimization algorithms to determine the best approach.
Engheta and Aflatouni’s light-based chip.
In a paper published in Nature Photonics, Engheta’s team joined forces with Firooz Aflatouni, associate professor in electrical and systems engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, whose research group has pioneered nanoscale silicon devices.
“Inverse design may seem unintuitive,” says Nikkhah, “but that’s where one of its strengths lies. It often involves numerical and topology optimization, where the material layout within a given design space is iteratively adjusted to make sure it’s consistent with the calculated outcome. This is what gives us configurations that go beyond what we as designers can achieve by guessing what would work.”
To achieve the team’s objective—making a chip that could perform vector-matrix multiplication using light—Nikkhah designed “low-index contrast” structures.
In this context, contrast refers to the difference in refractive indexes between the various regions of the metamaterials—with a low contrast indicating a smaller difference—which helps minimize the unwanted reflections and light scattering and leads to more efficient and predictable behavior as the light travels through the material.
“This method also lets us model light’s behavior in a more computationally efficient way when compared to traditional three-dimensional simulations,” Nikkhah adds.
Alan Willner, one of Engheta’s longtime professional colleagues and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professorial Chair and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC, finds the team’s approach to simplifying the design process particularly innovative. “Inverse design,” he says, “enabled them to have an incredibly efficient process and to achieve excellent performance.” He also believes that their findings presage a more efficient, elegant means of transmitting information well beyond the chip’s potential application in AI.
“There’s really very little power loss due to heat,” he notes Willner, since light encounters little resistance as it moves through the chip. Electrons, by contrast, throw off heat as they encounter resistance when traveling through conventional chips, which is why the fan on your computer turns on, and why today’s data centers need massive cooling systems.
Willner says data centers using light-based chips would use much less energy, leaving a smaller carbon footprint. What’s more, using light instead of electricity means more information can be carried at once. “The higher the frequency, the more data capacity you can handle,” says Willner. “The smaller the wavelength is, the more you can do in a smaller footprint.”
Andrea Alù, a former postdoctoral researcher in Engheta’s lab who went on to found the Photonics Initiative at the City University of New York, where he is also a distinguished professor and the Einstein Professor of Physics, likewise foresees chips like this one playing an integral role in future computers.
“The possibility of performing canonical operations, such as matrix multiplication, on a chip using light is very compelling,” says Alù, “as it would drastically reduce the energy needs and timescale of computations commonly done today with digital computers.”
Reading the tea leaves
Just like a good tea time conversation, innovations like Engheta and Aflatouni’s new chip testifies to the value of collaboration. “The success of ideas like the one presented in this paper,” says Maci, “often stems from the collaborative efforts of researchers who bring together their diverse expertise, perspectives and resources to tackle complex challenges and drive innovation in their respective fields.”
Nikkhah says turning the group’s idea of inverse design into a reality hinged on bringing together people with different skill sets. “While I focused on the theoretical and numerical optimization side,” he says, “others had expertise in fabricating and testing the devices.”
Looking ahead, Nikkhah says that one of the most exciting prospects of inverse design is the ability to render structures reconfigurable. In other words, future light-based chips could have materials that change properties with external excitation, allowing for dynamic control of optical devices.
At the moment, optical computing as a subset of analog computing is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional, or digital, computing. But whereas digital computers are reprogrammable, meaning that a single chip can be rejiggered to perform many different tasks, analog devices, like Engheta and Aflatouni’s new chip, can only perform the function for which they were designed—in this case, vector-matrix multiplication.
“In a conventional computer, you have one system, but you can do many things with it,” Engheta explains. “In our system, the chip does this function of multiplication. But imagine that you could also change the patterned material. That would mean you could change the matrix, and that would mean the chip could be reprogrammable in the future. We’re not there yet, but that would be one of the directions for a follow-up.”
If the team manages to pull that off—creating a chip that can perform calculations at the speed of light, using barely any energy, and be reprogrammable—the result will be brewed from more collaborative conversations. “It’s one of those situations where the result is larger than sum of the parts,” says Engheta, of the new chip.
Or, as Aflatouni puts it, “sometimes, one plus one really is more than two.”
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The School of Engineering and Applied Science is an undergraduate and graduate school of The University of Pennsylvania. The School offers programs that emphasize hands-on study of engineering fundamentals (with an offering of approximately 300 courses) while encouraging students to leverage the educational offerings of the broader University. Engineering students can also take advantage of research opportunities through interactions with Penn’s School of Medicine, School of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School.
Penn Engineering offers bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degree programs in contemporary fields of engineering study. The nationally ranked bioengineering department offers the School’s most popular undergraduate degree program. The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, offered in partnership with the Wharton School, allows students to simultaneously earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering. SEAS also offers several masters programs, which include: Executive Master’s in Technology Management, Master of Biotechnology, Master of Computer and Information Technology, Master of Computer and Information Science and a Master of Science in Engineering in Telecommunications and Networking.
History
The study of engineering at The University of Pennsylvania can be traced back to 1850 when the University trustees adopted a resolution providing for a professorship of “Chemistry as Applied to the Arts”. In 1852, the study of engineering was further formalized with the establishment of the School of Mines, Arts and Manufactures. The first Professor of Civil and Mining Engineering was appointed in 1852. The first graduate of the school received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1854. Since that time, the school has grown to six departments. In 1973, the school was renamed as the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The early growth of the school benefited from the generosity of two Philadelphians: John Henry Towne and Alfred Fitler Moore. Towne, a mechanical engineer and railroad developer, bequeathed the school a gift of $500,000 upon his death in 1875. The main administration building for the school still bears his name. Moore was a successful entrepreneur who made his fortune manufacturing telegraph cable. A 1923 gift from Moore established the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, which is the birthplace of the first electronic general-purpose Turing-complete digital computer, ENIAC, in 1946.
During the latter half of the 20th century the school continued to break new ground. In 1958, Barbara G. Mandell became the first woman to enroll as an undergraduate in the School of Engineering. In 1965, the university acquired two sites that were formerly used as U.S. Army Nike Missile Base (PH 82L and PH 82R) and created the Valley Forge Research Center. In 1976, the Management and Technology Program was created. In 1990, a Bachelor of Applied Science in Biomedical Science and Bachelor of Applied Science in Environmental Science were first offered, followed by a master’s degree in Biotechnology in 1997.
The school continues to expand with the addition of the Melvin and Claire Levine Hall for computer science in 2003, Skirkanich Hall for Bioengineering in 2006, and the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology in 2013.
Academics
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is organized into six departments:
Bioengineering
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Computer and Information Science
Electrical and Systems Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
The school’s Department of Bioengineering, originally named Biomedical Electronic Engineering, consistently garners a top-ten ranking at both the undergraduate and graduate level from U.S. News & World Report. The department also houses the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace (aka Biomakerspace) for training undergraduate through PhD students. It is Philadelphia’s and Penn’s only Bio-MakerSpace and it is open to the Penn community, encouraging a free flow of ideas, creativity, and entrepreneurship between Bioengineering students and students throughout the university.
Founded in 1893, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is “America’s oldest continuously operating degree-granting program in chemical engineering.”
The Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering is recognized for its research in electroscience, systems science and network systems and telecommunications.
Originally established in 1946 as the School of Metallurgical Engineering, the Materials Science and Engineering Department “includes cutting edge programs in nanoscience and nanotechnology, biomaterials, ceramics, polymers, and metals.”
The Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics draws its roots from the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, which was established in 1876.
Each department houses one or more degree programs. The Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics departments each house a single degree program.
Bioengineering houses two programs (both a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree as well as a Bachelor of Applied Science degree). Electrical and Systems Engineering offers four Bachelor of Science in Engineering programs: Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, and the Networked & Social Systems Engineering, the latter two of which are co-housed with Computer and Information Science (CIS). The CIS department, like Bioengineering, offers Computer and Information Science programs under both bachelor programs. CIS also houses Digital Media Design, a program jointly operated with PennDesign.
Research
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is a research institution. SEAS research strives to advance science and engineering and to achieve a positive impact on society.
Academic life at University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with over 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top universities in the country, Penn enrolls over 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.
Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.
The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.
Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).
Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. The university has a $20 billion endowment, one of the largest of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of over $2 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.
Distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include U.S. Supreme Court justices; U.S. senators; U.S. governors; members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); members of the Continental Congress; foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States. Nobel laureates; members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; billionaires; Rhodes Scholars; Marshall Scholars and Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.
History
The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.
In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale University, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.
Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.
The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.
Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).
After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.
Research, innovations and discoveries
Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has amounted to over $15 billion. Penn’s annual research expenditures are over $2 billion. Penn has received over $600 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts over 160 research centers hosting a research community of over 5,000 faculty and over 1,200 postdoctoral fellows, and 6,000 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research the University President established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.
Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With hundreds of PhDs awarded each year, Penn ranks very high in the Ivy League. It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees in the Ivy League and very highly nationally.
In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation especially in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in high rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the highest rankings in these fields.
Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.
Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.
Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.
International partnerships
Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics(UK), University of Barcelona [Universitat de Barcelona](ES), Paris Institute of Political Studies [Institut d’études politiques de Paris](FR), University of Queensland(AU), University College London(UK), King’s College London(UK), Hebrew University of Jerusalem(IL) and University of Warwick(UK).