Penn Engineering Students Receive IEEE Micro-Grant to Advance Acoustic Tool for Building Living Tissues

A team of Penn Engineering students has been selected as one of five teams worldwide to receive an IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society (UFFC-S) micro-grant to develop a new acoustic technology that could make it easier to build complex tissue models for biomedical research.

The interdisciplinary team, working in the laboratory of Shujie Yang, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), is developing a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT)-based acoustic tweezer, a device that uses sound waves instead of physical contact to precisely move and arrange cells into programmable patterns.

The award is part of the international Lab-in-Fab PMUT Application Student Competition, organized by A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics, STMicroelectronics and the IEEE UFFC-S. In addition to receiving up to $2,000 in funding, the finalists were provided with custom PMUT chips and printed circuit boards fabricated at A*STAR’s 200 mm pilot manufacturing facility.

“Our long-term goal is to enable more controllable and gentle biofabrication of multilayer cellular structures,” says Huaiyu Zuo, a doctoral student in MEAM. “By using acoustic fields, we can manipulate cells into designed patterns while monitoring the assembly process in real time.”

The custom PMUT chip and printed circuit board provided by IEEE. (Credit: Claire Sibley)

Building Tissues Without Touching Them

Traditional laboratory tools physically contact cells during manipulation, which can damage delicate biological materials. Acoustic tweezers work differently.

Instead of gripping cells directly, the system generates carefully controlled ultrasonic waves inside a liquid. Those sound waves create tiny forces that move cells into precise locations without ever touching them.

“The concept is analogous to conventional tweezers, except we use contactless acoustic force instead of physically gripping,” says Wenyi Huang, a doctoral student in MEAM. “By programming the acoustic field, we can control where particles and cells move.”

Concept of the PMUT-based acoustic tweezer (Credit: Yang Lab)

The researchers ultimately hope to use the technology to assemble organoids, miniature laboratory-grown versions of organs that allow scientists to study diseases and evaluate new treatments without relying on living organs.

Because acoustic manipulation is non-contact, it offers a gentler approach to arranging cells while preserving their viability, an important consideration for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

From Academic Research to Industrial Hardware

While the Yang Lab has extensive experience designing its own ultrasonic devices, the competition gives the team access to a new generation of PMUT hardware with capabilities beyond what they have previously used.

The custom chips contain arrays of independently controlled ultrasonic elements, allowing researchers to generate more sophisticated acoustic fields and manipulate particles with greater precision.

“I think it’s a very good opportunity for us to use a unique device,” says Huang. “Because it has many independently controlled acoustic units, we can generate more complex acoustic fields and improve the performance of our previous acoustic tweezers.”

Rather than simply proposing an idea, teams must build a functioning prototype using the supplied hardware.

Supporting the Next Stage of Development

The IEEE micro-grant will help fund the many iterations required to develop the system.

“The competition provides the PMUT chips and custom printed circuit boards, but we still need to build everything around them,” says Alex Yang (EE’29, PURM Fellow in the Yang Lab), an undergraduate member of the team. “The funding will support 3D-printed chambers and holders, biological samples and laboratory consumables that let us test the system.”

Those repeated experiments are essential for refining the device before the team’s final demonstration.

For Alex Yang, the project also highlights the interdisciplinary nature of ultrasonic technology.

“The core component is a transducer that converts electrical energy into mechanical motion and back again,” he says. “It’s exciting because it combines both electrical and mechanical engineering.”

Looking Ahead

Yang, Huang and Zuo in the Yang Lab (Credit: Claire Sibley)

Beyond the competition itself, the researchers see broader possibilities for programmable acoustic manipulation.

Huaiyu Zuo is particularly interested in using the technology to create more sophisticated tissue structures that could advance biofabrication research.

“I’m most excited about making biofabrication more dynamic and programmable,” says Zuo. “If we can successfully build multilayer cellular structures, I think there is tremendous potential for many biomedical applications, such as the generation of multilayer organoids and the modeling of solid tumors.”

The team will continue developing its prototype over the coming months before presenting its work at the IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium in September 2026, where finalists will demonstrate how their systems transform advanced ultrasonic hardware into practical biomedical tools.