A unique twist on the well-known TED Talk series came to Levine Hall on Wednesday night.
The Graduate Section of the Penn Society of Women Engineers put on Tech Talks, a presentation of discussions from industry experts.
“We’ve asked speakers from corporations and from Penn to come in and present on 10 minutes on a topic of their choosing” second-year masters student Amritaa Ganguly, who is also vice president of SWE, said. These topics are ones that will “inspire, motivate, and urge students to stay in and continue engineering.”
The Society invited four speakers: Lee Yanco, a product team member of AppNexus; Alisa Vasilenko, a senior chemist at L’Oreal USA in Hair Styling; Erin Vasudevan, an institute scientist at Moss Rehabilitation; and Katherine Kuchenbecker, an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics.
Tech Talks asked these four professionals to present how their work is challenging what people think engineering is capable of accomplishing. After each short presentation, students had the chance to ask these professionals about their projects and future plans.
Vasilenko started off the presentation series by asking the audience, “What is beauty?” Although she drew laughs from the crowd when she said her talk on the science of beauty was not technical, she said that her presentation is about “what it means for a scientist or engineer to be in the business of beauty” and how the process of product making is “really multifaceted and more like a puzzle and putting it together.”
Despite the fact that Vasudevan described herself to be more of a neuroscientist than an engineer, in her discussion, she informed students of the idea that technological devices could be used to improve the walking mobility of stroke victims. Throughout her presentation she showed videos of the walking progress that stroke victims can make simply by using treadmills that have two operative speeds for both the right and left sides.
Kuchenbecker started her talk presenting the audience with a dilemma: although her favorite hobby is photography, photographs can’t record what things feel like. She used this platform to introduce her work in haptography, or the study of touch technology. She went on to describe how her team has developed a mechanic stylus that allows its users to feel the presence, pressure and texture of an object by simply hovering it over a flat surface.
The event attracted dozens of undergraduates and graduates who came to hear the insights and recent innovations in the field of engineering from various professionals.
Engineering junior Eza Koch says what drew him to the event was the fact that “you can see a broad range of engineering life styles and careers” as well as “get to experience them and learn more about career paths after engineering at Penn.”
“Students were stimulated by seeing four talks on really cutting edge technology from four just different areas,” Kuchenbecker said. “There was something for everyone.”
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