Featured News
George Pappas and Nikolai Matni Receive the 2024 IEEE Control Systems Society Best Paper Awards
George Pappas, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) and Associate Dean for Research in Penn Engineering, and Nikolai Matni, Assistant Professor in ESE, have been recognized with awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) honoring their publications in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, respectively. READ MORE
Who to Vaccinate First? Penn Engineers Answer a Life-or-Death Question with Network Theory
Engineering and medical researchers at Penn have developed a groundbreaking framework that can determine the best and most computationally optimized distribution strategy for COVID-19 vaccinations in any given community. The team, comprised of Saswati Sarkar, Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti, Assistant Professor in ESE and Computer and Information Science (CIS), Harvey Rubin, a practicing physician at Penn Medicine and Professor of Infectious Diseases, and ESE doctoral student Raghu Arghal, designed their framework to be able to account for enough population complexity to determine the best and most applicable vaccination strategies, but not so complex that it becomes inaccessible to public health offices without high-powered supercomputers. READ MORE
Quibits to Qudits: Using Quantum
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the City University of New York (CUNY) have collaborated to develop a device that uses quantum principles to relay information securely – an advance that could improve encryption in critical service areas like banking and health care. The research was co-led by Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE). READ MORE
New Quantum Sensing Technology Reveals Sub-Atomic Signals
Penn Engineering researchers have utilized quantum sensors to realize a groundbreaking variation of nuclear quadrupolar resonance (NQR) spectroscopy, a technique traditionally used to detect drugs and explosives or analyze pharmaceuticals. Described in Nano Letters, the new method is so precise that it can detect the NQR signals from individual atoms — a feat once thought unattainable. This unprecedented sensitivity opens the door to breakthroughs in fields like drug development, where understanding molecular interactions at the atomic level is critical. “This technique allows us to isolate individual nuclei and reveal tiny differences in what were thought to be identical molecules,” says Lee Bassett, Associate Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), Director of Penn’s Quantum Engineering Laboratory (QEL) and the paper’s senior author. READ MORE
ESE News Feed
Innovation & Impact Podcast Episode 6: Leveraging Engineering and AI to Transform Human Health and Beyond
02.11.2025 | Read More
Qubits to qudits: Using quantum mechanics to transmit information more securely
02.10.2025 | Read More
Fifth Energy Week to Bring Penn Community Together Around Solutions
02.06.2025 | Read More
ESE Seminar Series
ESE Spring Seminar – “Generalization, Memorization, and Privacy in Trustworthy Machine Learning”
ESE Spring Seminar – “Can Robots Learn from Machine Dreams? – Robot Learning via GenAI-powered World Models”
IDEAS/STAT Optimization Seminar: “Statistics-Powered ML: Building Trust and Robustness in Black-Box Predictions”
About Penn ESE
Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) is a rapidly growing department within Penn Engineering whose mission is focused on synthesis of devices and design theory underlying the interface between the material world and the information and work humans seek to exchange with it and each other.
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