Global Pathways to Enable Innovative Materials Solutions for Urban Challenges

"Global Pathways to Enable Innovative Materials Solutions for Urban Challenges" will be a two-day event that is organized to explore the overlap in urban challenges for which innovative materials technology could play a significant role in solutions in three model cities (Grenoble, Philadelphia, Seoul). The event will combine a public symposium featuring practitioners, policy experts and academics who work on urban issues with a “researcher’s retreat” that will focus on scientific aspects of materials development relevant to the urban contexts defined in the public symposium. The retreat will bring together scientists from Penn, the Grenoble Innovation in Advanced New Technologies (GIANT) campus based in France, and a South Korean University (Sungkyunkwan). The event will also investigate broadening STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduate student training to best enable early career researchers to work on complex, multidisciplinary problems with international and policy scope. This event will build the foundation for scientific and educational collaboration around a large-scale project that has the potential to contribute meaningfully to improvement of the functioning and/or resilience of cities.