In the eighth episode of Penn Engineering’s Innovation & Impact podcast, host Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), sits down with one of the most influential figures in modern engineering, Kurt Petersen, widely recognized as the father of MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). From pioneering research at IBM to founding six startups and mentoring countless others, Petersen has not only helped define the MEMS field, but continues to shape its future.

Fresh off receiving the 2025 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering, Petersen shares the serendipitous moment that sparked his interest in MEMS: an ink-stained hallway and a leaky lab experiment. That curiosity led to a groundbreaking 1982 paper, “Silicon as a Mechanical Material,” which catalyzed an entire industry. Today, MEMS is everywhere — embedded in smartphones, drones, medical diagnostics and more. Yet, as Petersen makes clear, the field is far from saturated.

Listen to the full episode to gain insights into the evolution of MEMS, from the slow-burn research culture of early IBM and Bell Labs to today’s agile, impact-driven academic startups. Petersen and Kumar highlight the importance of bridging academia with industry and mentoring founders who can navigate both science and commercialization. Petersen’s reflections on timing, teamwork and translational research are a masterclass for anyone navigating the complex intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship.

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AI is at the forefront of technological advances and is also reshaping creativity, ownership and societal interactions. In episode 7 of Penn Engineering’s Innovation & Impact podcast, host Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, speaks with Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, about the journey of AI, how we define intelligence and the possibilities and challenges it presents.

With a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, LeCun’s academic background brought him to the AT&T Bell Laboratories after his first postdoctoral position in 1988, right at the cusp of the Internet Age. The work he began in his doctorate and later expanded on at Bell Labs would eventually become the foundational work for what we now know as AI. As testament to this work, LeCun was awarded the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing," a lifetime accomplishment in the field of computer science.

Listen to the full episode to hear more on everything from the intelligence of the neural nets that inspired LeCun’s original AI research to computers learning to play chess and how much longer we will have to wait to see machines reach a human level of intelligence.

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Episode 6 of the Penn Engineering Innovation & Impact podcast explores how chemical engineering, AI, and biochemistry converge at Penn to power the NSF Artificial Intelligence-driven RNA Foundry (NSF AIRFoundry).

Hosted by Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics.

Guests include:

Daeyeon Lee, Russel Pierce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, whose work examines the interactions of soft materials at or near interfaces to guide the assembly of macroscopic structures for applications in healthcare and sustainability;

Zachary Ives, Adani President’s Distinguished Professor and Chair of Computer and Information Science, who works on data integration and sharing, data provenance and trustworthiness, and machine learning systems; and

Kathy Liu, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, who brings her integral expertise in enzymology, biochemistry, spectroscopy, structural biology and RNA biology to this collaboration.

Each episode of Penn Engineering’s Innovation & Impact podcast shares insight from leading experts at Penn and Penn Engineering on science, technology and medicine.

Subscribe to the Innovation & Impact podcast on Apple Music, Spotify or your favorite listening platforms or find all the episodes on our Penn Engineering YouTube channel.

Follow Penn Engineering:

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