Vanessa Chan, Jonathan and Linda Brassington Practice Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Penn Engineering’s Vice Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is shaping a new kind of classroom. In her course, EAS5500: Applying Your Thesis to the Real World, Ph.D. students step beyond the lab and into the real-world ecosystems their research is meant to transform.
Chan’s course was launched in Spring 2026 to bridge a long-standing gap in engineering education: the divide between technical excellence and real-world impact.
“The way we train Ph.D. students is to focus on hard technical problems and success is defined by the number of papers you publish in quality journals,” says Chan. “But the future leaders in engineering need more than that to have an impact.”
As the former Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Chan uses her real-world experience to push students to examine the “adoption risks” of their proposed solutions. Grounded in the Adoption Readiness Level (ARL) framework developed under Chan’s leadership by DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization, the course helps students identify non-technical barriers, including market demand, policy, manufacturing and supply chains, that determine whether technologies succeed in the real world. Students are also paired with industry mentors and conduct hands-on analyses to actualize what they learn in the classroom and develop a thesis chapter focused on commercialization.
