Congratulations to Daniel Feshbach for receiving the Provost’s Graduate Academic Engagement Fellowship! This is such an impressive honor, especially since only two fellowships were given out across the whole University this year. The Provost’s Graduate Academic Engagement Fellowship is designed to recognize and support outstanding graduate students who demonstrate exceptional academic engagement and a commitment to fostering connections within their academic community. Daniel’s achievement reflects his hard work, dedication, and passion for his field, and we couldn’t be prouder of him.

Congratulations to Gabe for receiving the 2025 Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students, a university-wide honor, as well as the Outstanding Teaching Assistant (TA) Award in Mechanical Engineering for the Fall 2024 semester. Both awards were in recognition of his work in MEAM 2100: Statics and Strength of Materials, a required core course for all sophomore Mechanical Engineering students.

Read more about Gabe’s experience teaching here.

This year’s Penn Y-Prize competition featured novel technologies developed by members of the GRASP Lab, specifically the Sung Lab and ModLab.

We are thrilled to announce that the winner of this year’s Penn Y-Prize was Stentix! Their project, which utilized the MORF Technology developed in the Sung Lab, proposed a stent that can be adjusted noninvasively.

Congratulations to the entire Stentix team for your hard work and dedication!

Our recently submitted paper “MORF: Magnetic Origami Reprogamming and Folding System for Repeatably Reconfigurable Structures with Fold Angle Control” has been accepted for publication at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (2025 ICRA). Congratulations to the authors, Gabriel Unger, Sridhar Shenoy, Tianyu Li, Nadia Figueroa, and Cynthia Sung, for this exciting new research!

Springer has just published a Handbook on Soft Robotics. Thank you to Thrishantha Nanayakkara for including us with a chapter on Origami Robots! There will be a public meeting on April 30, 2025, at 5:30pm London time to discuss what is covered in the book and how to improve it in the future.

The book can be found at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68620-7