Climate Week at Penn returned October 5–9 for its seventh annual campus-wide program, bringing together students, faculty and staff to explore climate challenges and opportunities for action. This year’s theme, Empowerment and Action, highlighted the many ways members of the Penn community can turn research, education and collaboration into meaningful change.

Penn Engineering played a prominent role throughout the week, contributing programming that explored climate solutions across materials science, water, policy, artificial intelligence, energy and sustainability.

“I proposed this year’s theme, Empowerment and Action, to help frame climate change as a serious challenge yet one that we have the power to address,” says Lorena Grundy, Practice Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) who served on the core organizing committee and also helped to organize the Penn Engineering events for Climate Week. “It was encouraging to see the Penn community come together and focus on solutions.”

The week’s Penn Engineering events began with an inside look at nature-inspired engineering through the E-Seeds Lab Tour, hosted by the Shu Yang Group. Visitors saw how researchers create wood-based robotic seeds inspired by self-burying Erodium seeds. By responding to changes in moisture, the structures can move through soil and help create conditions for seed germination and plant growth, demonstrating how materials science, robotics and biology can come together to create sustainable systems.

On Wednesday, the H2Know: A Water Pollution Pop-Up, hosted by the McBride Lab in partnership with the Penn Engineering Futures Fund, The Water Center at Penn and Fairmount Water Works, brought climate and water science to College Green. Through demonstrations, real microplastics samples and hands-on activities, the event invited the Penn community to explore the connections between water pollution and a changing climate.

Climate action also requires an understanding of how research and technology connect to policy. The Decoding Climate Policy from City Hall to the White House panel, organized in part by the Penn Engineering Green Team, brought together former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Ali Zaidi, Practice Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and former White House National Climate Advisor, to discuss how data, communities and effective messengers can help advance climate policy.

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape research and society, Penn Engineering also helped tackle how institutions can maximize AI’s potential while addressing the environmental costs of the technology. At AI Use in a Climate Change Era, Benjamin Lee, Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) and Computer and Information Science and Associate Department Chair of ESE, joined researchers and University leaders to discuss AI applications in climate research, energy-efficient computing and the sustainability of the infrastructure that supports AI.

The week continued with a Nuclear Fusion Panel, hosted by Fusion@Penn, bringing researchers, engineers and industry voices together to discuss the technology behind fusion energy, the challenges that remain and what it will take to connect commercial fusion plants to the electrical grid.

Climate Week concluded with Transform Penn: A Green Fund Pitch Competition, organized by Penn Sustainability and Penn Engineering’s Energy and Sustainability Engineering master’s program. Student teams pitched practical sustainability ideas in a live competition designed to help turn campus-based concepts into projects that can be tested and implemented at Penn.

This year’s winners were two second-year undergraduate students in CBE, Christopher Zhu and Daniel Zheng, who proposed a plan to manage electricity usage on Red Days, which are days when the grid experiences peak stress.

“Engineers solve problems, and climate change is one of the defining problems of this century,” says Grundy. “Through Transform Penn, we’re giving students across the University an opportunity to pitch actionable projects that advance Penn’s climate and sustainability goals, and take real steps toward bringing those projects to fruition.”

Learn more about the full Climate Week at Penn on the event website.